Michael Harvey Hastings FMedSci FRS is a British neuroscientist who works at the Medical Research Council MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, UK.

With a view to becoming a science teacher, he took a Post-graduate Certificate of Education (Technical) at the Victoria University of Manchester, but then elected to pursue a career in biological research.

Hastings’ PhD work introduced him to biological clocks, in the context of tidal and semi-lunar rhythms in the marine isopod crustacean Eurydice pulchra (Leach).

[2] With a post-doctoral position in Cambridge (Department of Anatomy, supervisor Joe Herbert) he moved into seasonal time-keeping in mammals with a focus on the role of the pineal gland and its hormone melatonin in photoperiodic regulation of reproduction and metabolism.

In this time he developed a research programme into the cellular actions of melatonin in the brain, and the neurochemistry of the central circadian clock, the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the hypothalamus.