After graduating from The Agricultural University of Godollo in Hungary, Dr Hutvagner worked on his PhD in plant molecular biology and genetics at Dr Zsofia Banfalvi's laboratory in Hungary. He won several Hungarian and international short-term fellowships, which allowed him to work in Sweden and in the Netherlands. He had the opportunity to work on plant post-transcriptional gene silencing in the laboratory of Dr Jan Peter Nap at the Plant Research Institute in Wageningen. In 2001, he joined Dr Phillip Zamore's laboratory at the University of Massachusetts Medical School as a postdoctoral fellow. As a postdoc, he studied the biochemical pathway of RNAi and contributed to several key discoveries. He participated in the studies that showed that Dicer process miRNAs, miRNA could incorporate into cleavage competent silencing complexes and RISC formation is an asymmetric mechanism. In 2002, he won the postdoctoral fellowship of the Medical Foundation.

In 2005, Dr Hutvagner joined the Division of Gene Regulation and Expression at the School of Life Sciences of the University of Dundee as a lecturer and an independent investigator and he won the Wellcome Trust Career Development fellowship. His laboratory continues to unveil the mechanism of miRNA-mediated gene silencing in human cells and he has initiated projects to explain miRNAs function in diverse biological processes, including pathways leading to tumor formation.