John McCutcheon

John McCutcheon is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, professor in the School of Life Sciences, and associate director of the Biodesign Center for Mechanisms of Evolution. He and his group study bacteria (and sometimes fungi) that form long-term infections in host cells. Most of the symbioses his lab studies are beneficial, where the intracellular bacteria provide essential nutrients to their hosts, but he is also interested in transitions between pathogenic and beneficial infections. His group studies how and why symbioses form, how they are maintained, and why they sometimes breakdown. They use a variety of approaches—cell biology, genetics, genomics, microscopy, molecular biology, molecular evolution, biochemistry, and field biology—to address their questions.