David Hopwood


Sir David Alan Hopwood is a British microbiologist and geneticist.

Education

Educated at Purbrook Park County High School and Lymm Grammar School, Hopwood gained his Bachelor of Arts degree from St John's College, Cambridge and his PhD from the University of Glasgow in 1973.

Career

Hopwood served as an assistant lecturer in genetics at Cambridge until he became a Lecturer in Genetics at the University of Glasgow in 1961. He later became John Innes Professor of Genetics at the University of East Anglia. He is now an Emeritus Fellow in the Department of Molecular Microbiology at the John Innes Centre.

Awards and honours

Hopwood was awarded the Gabor Medal in 1995 "in recognition of his pioneering and leading the growing field of the genetics of Streptomyces coelicolor A3, and for developing the programming of the pervasive process of polyketide synthesis". In 2002, he co-authored the sequencing of the S. coelicolor A3 genome. During more than forty years he has been studying the genetics and molecular biology of the model actinomycete S. coelicolor.
Hopwood was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1979 and delivered their Leeuwenhoek Lecture in 1987. He is also the author of
His nomination for the Royal Society reads: