David Hutchinson

In 2017 Hutchinson was one of a team of science educators, including Ian Griffin and Amadeo Enriquez-Ballestero, who visited Chatham and Pitt Islands to work with school pupils. In 2019, the team visited Niue and the Cook Islands, and in 2020 Tonga, Fiji, Samoa, and Polyfest in Auckland with their education programme "Laboratory in a Box". In 2018 Hutchinson was a visiting fellow at Merton College, Oxford. He is an alumnus of the Global Young Academy.

Hutchinson was a member of the Jack Dodd Centre for Quantum Technology at Otago's Department of Physics, and served as the Director from 2010 to 2015, except for a period in 2012 when he was a visiting professor at the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore. He subsequently became director of the newly-founded Dodd-Walls Centre for Photonic and Quantum Technologies, a Centre of Research Excellence (CoRE) founded in 2014 through a merger of the Jack Dodd Centre and the University of Auckland's Dan Walls Centre. Formally launched in February 2015 and hosted by the University of Otago, it is composed of approximately 200 researchers and students from six New Zealand universities including the University of Auckland, Victoria University of Wellington, and the University of Canterbury.

Hutchinson has been a member of the Trust Board of the Otago Museum since 2008 and took over as chair of the Board after the death of Graham Crombie in 2019. He is a fellow and past president of the New Zealand Institute of Physics, and former president of the Otago Institute, the Royal Society Te Apārangi's Otago-Southland branch. He is also an elected fellow of the UK's Institute of Physics.

Hutchinson had a postdoctoral research fellowship at Dublin City University, Ireland, and then at Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario. He was a lecturer in physics at Somerville College, University of Oxford in the UK from 1997 to 2000. After visiting the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand during a Royal Society of London Study Visit in 1998, he moved to Dunedin in 2000 to take up a lectureship position at the university. He was promoted to senior lecturer in 2003, then associate professor, and in February 2015 became a full professor. In 2004 he was the first recipient of Otago University's Rowheath Trust Award and Carl Smith Medal, for outstanding research performance by an early-career researcher. in 2008 and 2009 he attended the annual World Economic Forum "Meeting of New Champions" in Tianjin, selected as "one of the world's 60 outstanding young scientists".

Hutchinson is a theoretical physicist, specialising in quantum systems and ultra-cold atomic gases. Specifically, he examines the effects of disorder in Bose-Einstein condensates (systems first created in 1995, and at University of Otago since 1998, which form at close to absolute zero). He has also worked in the FMO complex found in deep-sea bacteria which rely on infrared photons, and its possible implications for producing more efficient solar photovoltaic panels.

David A. W. Hutchinson (born 1969) is a quantum physicist and professor at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. He is the inaugural and current Director of the Dodd-Walls Centre for Photonic and Quantum Technologies, a New Zealand government-funded national Centre of Research Excellence. Hutchinson's research interests are in the areas of quantum biology, Bose-Einstein condensates, and the underlying mathematics of quantum physics.

Born in England in 1969, Hutchinson completed a BSc at the University of Exeter, UK, and received a PhD degree there in 1994 in the area of theoretical physics. He also holds a PGDip(Arts) in Philosophy from the University of Otago. He moved to New Zealand in 2000, and became a full citizen in February 2015. Hutchinson married Denise Casey in 2014, and their daughter Nancy was born in January 2015.