Dr. John R Hutchinson
[Image Description]: Dr. John R Hutchinson sits near some anatomy specimens. Dr. Hutchinson is a white man wearing blue jeans and a blue checked shirt.
[Image Description]: Dr. John R Hutchinson sits next to a T. rex “cadaver” that was dissected for a documentary that he was a principal science consultant on, “T. rex Autopsy”.
[Image Description]: Dr. Hutchinson scratches the neck of a tortoise, which they seem to enjoy. The photo was taken while studying how giant Galapagos tortoises move.
Meet Dr John R. Hutchinson, a professor of evolutionary biomechanics and a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Follow Dr Hutchinson at @JohnRHutchinson (X).
Tell us about your STEM!
My research focuses on how animals work and how they have evolved, especially animals with bones and limbs (tetrapods), and their locomotion. In other words, I study how major transitions in locomotion have been achieved, or just how unusual animals at any point in time work. I’m interested in how dinosaurs evolved, from how they began as small bipedal animals in the Triassic period around 225 million years ago to giant dinosaurs like a T. rex, a 6-ton biped 66 million years ago. That's actually how I made my career, studying T. rex and asking whether they could run quickly.
I have one foot rooted in the past and another foot rooted in the present for my research. I study living animals, both for their own sake, as well as to anchor studies in reality and check studies of extinct organisms. I’ve studied elephants a lot, about as much as I’ve studied T. rex. I study how elephants move, and how they gradually speed up. They shift from a walk with really stiff legs into a run, with bouncy pogo-stick sort of legs, without ever leaving the ground, which is very unusual. They switch their biomechanical mechanisms from stiff legs to bouncy legs, which goes against the conventional dogma that elephants are one of the few mammals that don’t run. What they do that’s weird, that other animals don’t, is they don’t have a discrete shift of gait like a horse does. Horses walk, trot, gallop, and it’s very obvious. But elephants just gradually change. You can’t see the shift, they just speed up and gradually get more bendy legged and more bouncy legged until eventually they’re running.
I've worked on all kinds of other animals using various methods: anatomy, histology, pathology, experiments with biomechanics, and just measuring how they move. We take a video camera and go somewhere to see what they do, how they run. We run them over devices that measure how much force they apply over the ground. Those are conventional biomechanics methods.There’s lots of imaging involved too: mainly CT and MRI scanning to get 3D anatomy. A lot of the work I do is very three dimensional and visual. We also use computer modeling and simulation, so building very realistic representations of organisms on computers, and then having the computer figure out how things work that we can’t experimentally measure, either on living animals or extinct animals, where all we might have are the bones.
What brought you to the field?
It's been a life journey. I was, at a very young age, precociously obsessed with monsters and myths. I was really into reading classical mythology, and looking at pictures of fantastic beasts, and into monster movies. I was into big, fierce things in general; weird animals like crocodiles. I had a stuffed crocodile that I called “Daca Dial”, which were some of my first words. I’ve always loved reptiles – I’ve never found snakes or anything else to be gross. That’s persisted all my life. I got more and more into animals, unconventional animals, maintaining this theme of liking scary things, big things, impressive things that inspire awe. So naturally I got into dinosaurs: they’re big, extinct, and mysterious.
Fast forward to undergrad, I read the book Jurassic Park, and the movie came out not long after that. I was taking evolution classes and anatomy, and reading a lot about evolution. I got more interested again in paleontology (I had briefly left them behind during my teenage years), but now I was coming back to it with a more scientific mind. I realized that I was interested in evolution, dinosaurs, and movement. Ultimately I applied to do a PhD, and proposed to bring together all the things I liked. I suggested we could use biomechanics to test whether a T. rex could really run the way they do in popular media.
I also do a lot of consulting on documentaries, I've worked on 20 different documentaries and a few movies. I do this because the people that make movies want the movement of animals to be accurate, convincing, and realistic. Filmmakers really want to have good movement, they really care about it. So I get asked a lot for advice on how they can tweak things to make various species look better. It’s a lot of fun, and I love it. It’s a neat convergence of art and science because it’s so visual. You’ve got to create something that shows to people what this might have looked like, and it takes art to convey what scientists are reconstructing.
What accommodations allow you to thrive in STEM?
When I was a postdoc, I had a stroke after having some blood clots, and found out I have a clotting disease. The stroke left me with some residual effects, luckily not too many, but ever since I have had problems with drowsiness, brain fog, stuff like that. For me it was a mild disability. Then in 2014, out of the blue, I had a series of seizures, and found out rather shockingly that I had developed epilepsy, which can sometimes follow many years after a stroke. But the epilepsy was really hard, and I had a moment of clarity with my department head. I sat down with him after the dust was settling after the initial seizures, and he said “John, you’re disabled, and that’s a very powerful thing. What can we do for you?”. He was really good at supporting me, and I’m so grateful for him, because that was the moment when I realized I was disabled. I didn’t really know that, and I didn’t know that I deserved accommodation. I’d just thought, well, all right, I’ll have to struggle through on my own, I shouldn’t even ask for help. But he gave me help, and I still have that help.
I'm lucky to work in a place where I’m already a successful professor, and was at the time when I got epilepsy. But they’ve always been accommodating, even before then. So I'm grateful and very privileged on that front.
On the disability side, the brain fog got a lot worse with the seizures, and still is. The medication I’m on to prevent seizures certainly makes things worse, and brings more drowsiness. I have a hard time thinking clearly, which in science is really rough, because sometimes you really need to concentrate. Sometimes I just can’t concentrate. I have a hard time learning sometimes because of that, even pretty simple things. I just can't do it, and it's really frustrating.
My main coping mechanism is to be patient with myself, not blame myself, give myself time, and work hard when I’m able. But when I’m just not able - go and take a nap. Don’t beat myself up about it, it’s ok. There will be another time when I”m able to do things, so for now just set them aside. Especially the harder stuff. Sometimes the easier stuff, like emails, can be done when I don’t have the capacity for harder things. I try not to stress too much about it, because so many things are out of my control. The seizures are so unpredictable. I don’t know what else to learn from that except that life is really unpredictable, and you have to be ready for curve balls.
I was already active on social media before the epilepsy hit me. I was blogging openly about my experiences as a scientist, and I found it to be a form of therapy, talking about things. When the epilepsy hit, I decided that it was an opportunity for me to talk about my experience. I’d had a really traumatic experience on a plane flight when I had a full on seizure: people pulled me from my chair, broke one of my shoulders and dislocated the other. I woke up in horrible pain, with two hours left of the flight and no pain medication besides paracetamol. It was awful. I wrote a blog post about it, which is still one of my favorite pieces of writing I’ve done, scientific or otherwise. People really appreciated that post: I got a lot of public and private responses. I decided that I was going to take my blog in a different direction and write more about what I was going through with my disability. It’s a kind of therapy for me, but I also knew that other people would be reading it and realizing that they weren’t the only people going through this sort of thing.” Look at this guy, he’s really successful, but he’s also suffering and disabled. So maybe there’s hope.” That’s what I'm most happy to hear, being an invisibly disabled person, is that my work helps other people. I’m very privileged to be a professor, and that help is what I should be doing if I can.
If there’s an accommodation there, it’s that I’m accommodating myself. I’m opening myself up and helping myself be open about my problems. People continue to be very responsive to it, even almost ten years later. And more and more I’ve tried to learn how to be better at reaching out to the disabled community. For a while it was just me posting stuff, but now, especially through Twitter, I’m trying to interact with more people that are posting stuff about their disabilities, and with support groups and advocacy groups, adding my voice to theirs. I’m trying to amplifytheir voices.
And then in 2023, I was elected to the Royal Society as a Fellow, and I see it as a challenge for me to take that position of enormous privilege and try to make something even better out of it. I’m challenging myself to do more with it, I haven’t figured that out yet entirely though. I’m sure I’ll sit on some EDI committees and so forth, which the Royal Society is very keen on. That’s the journey ahead of me. What can I do now? I want to do something better than what I’ve been doing, substantially better, and make a difference for other people that’s more measurable and perhaps more obvious.
Any advice for people with disabilities just starting their journeys in STEM?
I'm still trying to learn the lessons from my experience of what I would tell other people, especially earlier career scientists about what I’ve gone through. Everyone’s experience is so different that it’s hard to give good general advice! There’s accepting the loss of control, and partitioning the things I can control from the things I can’t. I think everyone has to come to terms with that at some point in their lives, because life really is a story of grappling with what you can and can’t control, and disability is a great example of that. It often is helpful to release the anxiety of trying to control the things you can’t - but that’s easier said than done. Try to refocus yourself on the stuff you can control, and find discipline at tackling those things, rather than getting caught up in the things that you just can’t change.
What would you like people to know about being disabled in STEM?
I would emphasize that being disabled is tremendously diverse - just saying someone is disabled doesn’t give you much information or understanding of them. You’ve got to be curious about disability, because accommodations and needs will be so diverse. If someone is speaking about it, then you should be curious and open about it. Try to find out what someone really needs, if they seem willing to discuss it.
I often feel like there’s two sides - the visibly disabled community, and the invisibly disabled community, both of whom face somewhat different challenges. At least with visibly disabled people, others can see and hopefully think (although they often don’t) that this person might need some extra accommodation. With invisibly disabled people, unless you speak up, unless you make yourself really open about your disability, then no one knows. That puts invisibly disabled people at a disadvantage where you’ve got to think about whether it’s safe to speak up. Do you know this person? Can you trust this person? Can you trust this institution?
I think that finding people you can trust, and processes that you can trust, is very important. Getting to know the rules, for example, is challenging because many able-bodied people might not know what the rules are. You can use rules about accessibility to your advantage. I’ve never had to do that myself, but I can see how it could be helpful. Also, writing about experiences (either privately or publicly), I think is really helpful. Either a personal monologue, or opening up some sort of dialogue about what you’ve been going through on social media, or speaking at events.
I still sometimes feel a kind of imposter syndrome about being disabled. I might gaslight myself, doubting that I should self-identify as disabled. It is part of my critical thinking habit to doubt myself, which in this case is not helpful. I feel like my journey, even though it’s almost ten years old, has still only just begun (compared to some people who have dealt with it their whole lives).
Anything else to share about your story?
Throughout my career I've really integrated science communication into my work. I don't just see myself as a researcher, I see myself as a researcher with education integrated into that. Part of education is science communication, and part of science communication can be disability advocacy. It’s all tied together. I’m one person, all those things are part of my identity and part of my career. It’s important that we consider disability advocacy as part of science communication where, if possible, you're openly talking about disability in STEM. It’s all part of the same picture. And I’m a firm believer in the human side of science, that science is indivisibly a human endeavor. You can’t understand science without understanding scientists as people. You've got to understand the person behind any science, and whether they're able-bodied or disabled, it has a huge impact on the science they do. We know from psychological studies that what you as a person bring to your work has an impact on the final outputs and interpretations. So it's really important who you are as a human being, and how you relate to others. We’re social beings, and we need to acknowledge that human aspect to being a scientist.
It's wrapped into the same identity that’s part of who you are. Over the past few years I’ve come to recognize disability as part of my identity as a scientist and as a human being. I don’t partition out the disability from the other stuff I do. It influences everything I do, and the science I do has very much been impacted by it.
