Nick Hudson

Nick is interested in fostering efficient, environmentally friendly animal production enterprises. He uses the data and capabilities provided by modern 'omics technologies to help improve breeding decisions and to inform other types of 'on farm' intervention.

Nick has a parallel interest in the development, physiology, metabolism and conservation of native Australian species, particularly frogs and butterflies.

Nick is a metabolic biochemist by training with research expertise in a) the handling and biological interpretation of large, complex data sets b) molecular technologies c) mitochondrial physiology and d) metabolic flux.

Nick enjoys teaching various aspects of biochemistry and molecular biology to both undergraduate and postgraduate students. He highlights the main themes using the comparative method and illustrates their importance through applied examples from agriculture and other areas of human endeavour.

Before taking his current position as a Teaching and Research academic in the School of Agriculture and Food Sustainability (AGFS) Nick worked for the CSIRO in a research intensive multi-disciplinary Systems Biology group.

Through this group he helped develop and apply bioinformatic methods that used metabolite, protein, RNA and DNA biotech to understand, model and predict phenotypes of commercial importance in cattle, sheep, pigs and chickens.

A research highlight from this time was the co-invention of a universal method for inferring causal molecules from genome-wide gene expression data (Hudson et al 2009. PLoS Comp Biol e1000382). This method has been applied across a diverse range of model systems including human kidney cancer and commercial traits in various agricultural species.

Following an undergraduate degree in Animal Biology at the University of St.Andrews, Nick was awarded his PhD through what was then the Zoology department of the University of Queensland, after travelling from England on a Britain-Australia Society funded Northcote Scholarship.