Sir David Alan Hopwood (born 19 August 1933) 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(2), and for developing the programming of the pervasive process of polyketide synthesis".
In 2002, he co-authored the sequencing of the
S. coelicolor A3(2) 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 Streptomyces in Nature and Medicine: The Antibiotic Makers.
His nomination for the Royal Society reads: