Paul Hardin (born September 14, 1960) is an American scientist in the field of chronobiology and a pioneering researcher in the understanding of circadian clocks in flies and mammals.
Born in a suburb of Chicago, Matteson, Illinois, Hardin currently resides in College Station, Texas, with his wife and three children.
[3] In 1971, Ron Konopka, a geneticist at the California Institute of Technology, discovered the Period gene, which he found to be involved in the circadian clock of Drosophila.
[5] As a post-doctorate in the lab of chronobiologist Dr. Michael Rosbash, Hardin specifically noted that per mRNA levels in Drosophila brains fluctuate about 10-fold in a typical 24-hour light-dark cycle.
This discovery led Hardin and other prominent members in the field of chronobiology to develop a model that describes the clock mechanism in Drosophila.
This proved to be vital in establishing the function of the previously discovered CLOCK protein, which was known to play a role in circadian rhythms and contained a bHLH domain as well.
[7] While teaching at the University of Houston, Hardin, along with fellow scientists Balaji Krishnan and Stuart Dryer, investigated circadian rhythms of olfaction in Drosophila.
Therefore, Hardin's team discovered that circadian rhythms control the olfactory response in Drosophila antennae and his results were eventually published in Nature.
[9] In 1999, Hardin along with Nick Glossop and Lisa Lyons, conducted research on the specific role of Clk in the interlocked feedback loops present in Drosophila circadian oscillators.
Lastly, his lab has been working on identifying if the interlocked loops in the feedback mechanism function as a circadian oscillator or a clock output.