He matriculated at Lehigh University for his undergraduate studies eventually electing to major in the newly created Department of Engineering Mechanics.
After finishing his thesis in the spring of 1963, Hutchinson spent a six-month post-doctoral period at the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen hosted by Frithof Niordson, the head of the solid mechanics department.
He worked his way through the ranks at Harvard and served on the faculty for fifty years and continues at the university as a Research Professor (emeritus status).
In addition to Budiansky, there were George Carrier (fluids and applied mathematics), Bruce Chalmers (metallurgy) and Lyell Sanders (solids), to name just a few.
When hired as an assistant professor, Hutchinson was told forthrightly by his Dean that there would be no possibility of a tenure slot opening up and he should view his position as a temporary five-year job.
On the mechanics side, Budiansky at Harvard and Frank McClintock at MIT were pioneers in this shift in emphasis and both contributed to Hutchinson's interest in what became known as the micro-mechanics of materials.
The linear fracture mechanics existing at the time was not applicable when extensive plastic deformation occurred prior to cracking, which is typically the case for many engineering alloys.
Moreover, he never fully abandoned subjects he had earlier pursued thereby gradually accumulating a fairly large array of research interests and technical expertise.
New areas included a major effort to develop a comprehensive mechanics of the fracture and delamination of layered materials, such as thin films and coatings and the multilayers used in electronics and optics, and the extension of the classical plasticity theory of metals to small scales where strong effects related to size become dominant.
Most recently Hutchinson has focused his attention on the stability of deformation of soft materials such as elastomers and gels, which have emerged as being of major interest, especially because of potential bio-medical applications.
A telling statistic, which is not as unusual as it might sound for an active researcher these days, at least one who has been working for over fifty years, is that Hutchinson has published almost 350 technical papers and the number of different co-authors (i.e., distinct individuals) is nearly 200.
Hutchinson was awarded the Ludwig-Prandtl-Ring from the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Luft- und Raumfahrt (German Society for Aeronautics and Astronautics) for "outstanding contribution in the field of aerospace engineering" in 2012.