Jonathan Hodgkin

Jonathan Hodgkin graduated with a degree in Zoology from Oxford (Merton College) in 1971 and went on to graduate work at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge (PhD 1974, Darwin College). There he pursued research on the genetics of Caenorhabditis elegans, a tiny soil nematode which has become an immensely useful and widely studied model organism for investigating many different areas of biology. After that, he moved to America (Stanford, California) for two years of post-doctoral research on bacterial motility, before returning to MRC-LMB where he spent most of the next 25 years, continuing to investigate nematode development and sex determination. In 2000, he was appointed to the Chair of Genetics in Oxford (Keble College), working in the Department of Biochemistry and acting as Associate Head (2005-2017) and Director of Teaching (2014-2017). He formally retired in 2016 but remains active in research, studying nematode genetics and innate defence against bacterial pathogens.