During the Second World War, he volunteered on Aviation Medicine at Farnborough and was subsequently transferred to the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) where he worked on the development of centimetric radar, including the design of the Village Inn AGLT airborne gun-laying system. Earlier, in March 1941, Hodgkin had flown on the test FLIGHT of a Bristol Blenheim fitted with the first airborne centimetric radar system. As the war ended in 1945, he joined the faculty of physiology department in Cambridge University. He was the Foulerton Professor of the Royal Society between 1951 and 1969. He served on the Royal Society Council from 1958 to 1960 and on the Medical Research Council from 1959 to 1963. He was foreign secretary of the Physiological Society from 1961 to 1967. He was appointed the John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Biophysics at Cambridge University in 1970. He also held additional administrative posts such as Chancellor, University of Leicester, from 1971 to 1984, and Master, Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1978 to 1985.