Meet Billy Hinchen, winner of the 2026 writing challenge

During August, we ran a writing challenge, giving contributors to the Node a chance to win £200 for publishing a blog post on our website. We really appreciate the effort that all of our contributors put into sharing posts on the site, and we hoped that the challenge would help motivate and encourage writers to share their ideas. The Node is a community for all, regardless of experience, background, skills or career stage. For this reason, we decided to award the prize by randomly selecting the winner rather than a competitive format. We hope this approach reassured authors to share on the Node without apprehension that their work would be judged. 

The winner of our writing challenge was Billy Hinchen with the post ‘The little beach hopper that could’. This entry explores the story of the unsung hero, the beach hopper. Check out our interview with Billy.

Tell us about yourself.

I’m a freelance science writer and copywriter, working mostly for those in the biotech industry. They have cool science but struggle to get that across to clients or the public, and I can understand the science well enough, and write well enough, that I can bridge that gap. I’m a wordy bridge, essentially. I started writing back in 2011, and went freelance in 2019, but before all that I was in a lab at Cambridge poking crustacean embryos to see what on earth cells are doing in the stages leading up to gastrulation.

Can you describe your research journey? 

My first taste of proper research was at the University of Plymouth, where I was looking at copper-induced neurotoxicity in catfish. I’d always loved ecotoxicology, and with a marine biology background, it was a perfect step into research. I quickly realised that having the lab to myself, with experiments to plan, failures to recover from and just a whole world of independence afforded to me, research was the one.

From there I started a PhD at Cambridge with Cassandra Extavour in the lab of Michael Akam. Bit of a subject shift, for sure, but dev bio was another thing I was always in awe of (after looking at On Growth and Form, by D’arcy Wentworth Thompson – go read it!) and I’m not a fan of limiting myself to one topic forever.

Starting out felt like the very deepest of deep ends and I had lead weights made of solid imposter syndrome tied around my ankles. But, I eventually settled and got into the swing of things, from peeling Parhyale embryos with tungsten needles under the microscope, to running endless antibody stains on the hunt for beta-catenin and finally into making lots, and lots and lots of 4D time-lapse movies of these embryos. By the end, I felt fully confident about how research works, and, like anyone studying something long enough, just how little I knew in the grand scheme of things!

After that, I spent a short spell in a biophysics lab with Susan Cox at King’s College London. They needed someone who could work with embryos for a microscopy experiment they were running (controlled light exposure microscopy), so I jumped in. Absolutely incredible! I had to pick up C. elegans embryology super quick and work alongside some brilliant physicists. It’s rather impressive how much our academic backgrounds didn’t overlap! But interdisciplinary research is a true joy, and I encourage everyone to get out of their comfort zone and go get cosy with other scientists from other fields.

What does Parhyale hawaiensis mean to you on a personal level? What inspired you to write this story? 

I’ve been a science writer for a long time now, and a common theme in what a lot of folks are saying is just how much their work is going to “accelerate innovation”, cause a “paradigm shift” or some other hyperbolic marketing sentiment. 99% of the time it’s not true, but the emphasis on practical, tangible outputs that will have a huge impact is consistently (over)stated.

Parhyale for me is plain old humble. It’s a tiny little crustacean that looks a bit like a shrimp and at the time, was worked on by just a handful of people who all knew each other on a first-name basis. It wasn’t claiming to change the field or revolutionise medicine; it just had some cool embryos that were amenable to experimental manipulation. But because of its flexibility, it was slowly adopted by a new lab, then another, then another, and then it suddenly crossed disciplines. Such an innocuous little critter, making no grand claims, but being used to develop new tools and answer new questions by new scientists from new fields – like a tiny little baton of research. And all without the fanfare that usually accompanies this sort of thing. I like that.

How did you pivot from research to science writing?

Honestly, it was an accident. Academia was the only career I ever wanted, but that all went a little awry and I needed work. Someone suggested medical writing, which I’d never heard of, and the rest is history.

What are your favourite things about your career as a scientific writer?

As a freelance writer, it’s freedom. I don’t have to waste time in meetings or fill my time with pointless jobs just to keep busy during the day. I take on clients I like, I write in bursts, take my son to and from school and go surfing when the waves look good. Being able to choose my own schedule and my own clients has been my favourite aspect of this by far.

But in general, I’d say it’s dipping my toes in all the different fields of biology. Admittedly, sometimes it feels a little shallow because it’s always someone else’s research, and I don’t think I’ll ever not want to be at the bench, but it can be fascinating to read and write about something you’d never even considered up until you start researching it!

Do you have any advice for researchers who are interested in a career in science writing?

Figure out the type of writing you want to do. Do you want to translate science for the public, or do you want to help companies articulate the benefits of something? Do you want to do journalism or editing? Once you’ve got an idea, start doing it. Start on a blog or LinkedIn and start putting your writing goal into practice. Show people your voice – don’t waste your time trying to sound professional, just be honest. Also, read the terrible things people write across their webpages and write about why they’re wrong and what you’d do differently! I kid you not, in no time at all you’ll have a better understanding of what not to do when it comes to science writing.

Where can people find other pieces written by you?

You can find a whole range of subjects I write about for fun over on my blog, rant & reason: https://billhinchen.substack.com

Want to take Billy’s advice about writing? The Node, as well as our other community sites, preLights and FocalPlane, give you a place to share your writing and provide a network that supports you through the writing process. With this in mind, please reach out to any of our Community Managers if you would like to discuss any ideas or drafts for the sites, or if you would like to join the preLights community team. In addition to written posts, the Node welcomes other types of audio or visual communication, including images, illustrations and videos. With challenges such as this one, we also want to remind our readers and authors that anyone can write and publish a blog, and you don’t need an invitation to do so.