Peter Gardner is a Professor of Analytical and Biomedical Spectroscopy in the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Photon Science Institute at the University of Manchester. He has previously held research positions at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin and the University of Cambridge. He is a physical chemist with 40 years of research experience in the field of infrared and Raman spectroscopy. In 1999 he turned his attention to applying infrared microscopy to the analysis of cells and tissue. He has been working closely with the Christie hospital in Manchester and the Manchester Cancer Research Centre (MCRC) developing new methods to analyse tissue samples from biopsies with a view to helping pathologists better diagnose cancer. He is leader of a UK network CLIRPath-AI, bringing together the communities of spectral pathology, digital pathology and computational pathology/AI. He is president of the international society for clinical spectroscopy CLIRSPEC.