Jay Hinton is the Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis at the University of Liverpool, UK. He did his first degree in Microbiology, when he was inspired to think genetically by Prof. George Salmond. After his PhD, he moved to the University of Oxford to work on the regulation of virulence gene expression in Salmonella, and subsequently moved to Norwich, UK, as Head of Molecular Microbiology at the Institute of Food Research.
He has been fascinated by bacterial functional genomics for the past 20 years. In 2003, he pioneered a transcriptomic approach that revealed a “snapshot” of Salmonella gene expression during the process of infection of mammalian cells, and co-discovered the H-NS-mediated mechanism of silencing gene expression in bacteria in 2006.
Jay moved to Liverpool in 2012 to refocus his lab on the lethal epidemic of bloodstream infections caused by Salmonella in sub-Saharan Africa. His team is now using a combination of molecular microbiology, genomics and functional transcriptomics to generate new insights. Recent discoveries include the determination of the role of a single noncoding nucleotide in the over-expression of a key virulence factor in African Salmonella (Hammarlöf et al, PNAS) and an understanding of the step-wise evolution of African Salmonella (Pulford et al, Nature Microbiology).
Jay was elected to membership of the European Academy of Microbiology in 2018.