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Harnessing microbiology to tackle global challenges

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Biography

Matt Hutchings grew up on a council estate and left school at 18 with two A’ levels. After working for a year as a laboratory assistant in the chemical pathology lab at St Helier Hospital in London he was advised by a clinician that he could get into a polytechnic with two A’ levels and should go and get a degree. The best advice he ever received.

He went to Portsmouth Polytechnic (now University) to complete a degree in Biology and then on to the University of Southampton to do a PhD on regulation of the guaBA operon in E. coli. In 1998 he moved to Norwich for postdoctoral work first at UEA, with Prof Stephen Spiro on the regulation of the nitrogen cycle, and then at the John Innes Centre with Prof Mark Buttner on the cell envelope stress response in Streptomyces coelicolor.

He set up his own group at UEA in 2006 as a Research Councils UK Fellow and was promoted to Professor of Molecular Microbiology in 2016. In August 2020 he moved back to the John Innes Centre to take up a Group Leader position and is now Head of the Department of Molecular Microbiology.

His group primarily study multicellular, filamentous actinobacteria which make 60% of the antibiotics we use in medicine. They are interested in understanding the regulation of antibiotic production in response to environmental and host-derived signals. They also want to understand the roles of these antibiotics in mediating interactions with other microbes and with insects and plants in their natural environment.

In his spare time he takes his sons to watch every Norwich City FC home game (it’s character building), watches his sons play football, obsesses over alternative music and plays the drums.