Dr. John Archer is Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer at HutanBio, a pioneering biotechnology company developing net-negative carbon algal biofuels for hard-to-abate transport sectors including aviation, shipping, and heavy land transport.

John holds a PhD in Microbial Genetics from the University of Glasgow and completed postdoctoral training at MIT before spending 20 years at Cambridge University in the Department of Genetics. He was headhunted to King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) where he founded the international R&D team behind HBx algal biofuel.

John led the world's largest marine microalgae bioprospecting program, screening over a trillion samples from the Red Sea, South China Sea, and Malacca Straits to discover the proprietary Sphaerica strain that delivers up to 10x yield improvements over previous algae strains.

HutanBio was co-founded in 2019 with Dr. Noor Azlin Mokhtar and Suhaiza Ahmad Jamhor after a decade of rigorous research and development. The company secured 2.25M in seed funding from Clean Growth Fund in 2024 and is based in Cambridge, UK with operations in Malaysia.

HutanBio's HBx biofuel achieves net-negative carbon emissions with independent assessment showing production removes up to 1.48 tonnes of CO2e per tonne of biofuel produced. The company is preparing for commercial deployment with planned biofarms in Morocco, Australia, and the Middle East to serve the global maritime and aviation sectors.