Rate My Professor Chris Palmer

Chris Palmer holds a Bachelor of Science with Honours (BSc Hons) and a Postgraduate Diploma in Science (PG Dip Sci) from the University of Otago. He is employed as a Programmer Scientific in the Information Technology Services (ITS) Research and Teaching Group, supporting the Department of Mathematics and Statistics within the Division of Sciences at the University of Otago. Palmer has held this position since February 2005, operating from Science III, room 421c, where he provides essential programming and computational support for departmental research, teaching, and operations. His contact telephone number is +64 3 479 7739.

Palmer has contributed to significant research outputs in computational biology and microbiology. He is listed as a co-author on the paper 'PADLOC: a web server for the identification of antiviral defence systems in microbial genomes,' published in Nucleic Acids Research in 2022 (Payne et al.), which has received 229 citations. This publication details the development of the PADLOC web server, designed to identify antiviral defence systems in prokaryotic genomes. Key features include detection of CRISPR arrays and retron non-coding RNAs, alongside a precomputed database covering over 230,000 RefSeq genomes, revealing diverse defence system distributions across taxa such as Campylobacterota and Spirochaetota. Palmer's programming expertise from ITS facilitated this tool's creation. He has also been thanked for technical support in multiple departmental publications and PhD theses, including 'Mathematical and Statistical Modelling of Slow Slip Events' (Ma, 2022) and others involving statistical and mathematical research at Otago. Furthermore, Palmer assisted in organising the University of Otago Junior Maths Competition, collaborating with departmental staff.