Rob Hutchinson is an entomologist and one of the top mosquito experts in Europe whose work assesses the risk of Malaria returning to UK.  This short video shows how he left working in the construction industry and moved into a career working in science.

Robert has lived in Romford all of his life.  He left school with one O` level in Biology and became a scaffolder.  He did that for 10 years during which time he also completed a part-time correspondence course gaining some more O`levels and an A`level in environmental science and human biology.  At the age of 27 he got really fed up with his work and decided to do a full time degree, applying to the nearest university to his home.  Robert was married and had two children by this time.  He says it was more of an escape than a career move, he just wanted to spend some time doing something that he enjoyed. 

In his last year he developed a great interest in mosquito biology and went straight to a masters degree at the School of Tropical Medicine in London, specialising in Malaria.  He is now the leading medical entomologist looking at Malaria in the UK.  He has worked all over the world including trips to Africa and Ecuador.  His work involves field collections of mosquitoes in the UK to look for potential outbreaks of malaria and west Nile virus (in 1999 there was a west Nile virus outbreak that killed hundreds of people in the USA).

In this short film we see him collecting mosquitoes wintering over in a derelict school on the Isle of Sheppy, the epicentre of the last malaria epidemic in the UK in 1914.

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