Rate My Professor Anna Gosling

Dr. Anna Gosling serves as a Lecturer and Research Fellow in the Department of Anatomy within the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Otago. She obtained her Bachelor of Biomedical Sciences (BBiomedSc), Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honours (BA(Hons I)), Master of Science (MSc), and Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degrees from the University of Otago. Her PhD thesis, completed in 2016 and awarded exceptional distinction, is titled Pacific People, Metabolic Disease and Evolutionary Processes. Gosling's academic career includes a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Rutherford Foundation of the Royal Society Te Apārangi in 2019, supporting her research on genetic origins of gout and metabolic disease in Pacific populations.

Her research specializes in biological anthropology, focusing on human genetic variation in ancient and modern populations, particularly Pacific peoples. She investigates the evolutionary processes behind high prevalences of metabolic diseases like gout, type 2 diabetes, and chronic kidney disease, using ancient DNA and modern genomic data. Key findings include evidence that genetic variants conferring hyperuricaemia may have provided adaptive advantages against malaria in ancestral environments. Select publications encompass "Pacific populations, metabolic disease and ‘Just‐So Stories’: A critique of the ‘Thrifty Genotype’ hypothesis in Oceania" (Annals of Human Genetics, 2015), "Ancient genomes from the Himalayas illuminate the genetic history of Tibetans and their Tibeto-Burman speaking neighbors" (Nature Communications, 2022), "Hyperuricaemia in the Pacific: why the elevated serum urate levels?" (Rheumatology International, 2014), and recent works such as "Mitonuclear discordance and gout, type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease in Aotearoa New Zealand Indigenous Māori and Pacific people" (Annals of Human Genetics, 2026). Gosling received the University of Otago Early Career Researcher Excellence Award in 2022 for her transdisciplinary contributions to Pacific health research. She has supervised PhD students from Pacific nations, including Guam and Kiribati, fostering capacity in genetic epidemiology.