Biography: Will Hughes
Dr. Will Hughes is an Associate Professor of the Micron School of Materials and the Associate Dean of the College of Innovation + Design. He is a member of the university’s interdisciplinary Nanoscale Materials and Device Research Group, where his team engineer’s biomolecular tools made from DNA. Active projects include patterning lithographic masks with DNA, encoding information into DNA for archival storage, and programming DNA for early-stage and low-cost diagnostic applications.
Dr. Hughes completed undergraduate and doctoral degrees in Materials Science and Engineering, studying first at Virginia Tech, and then at Georgia Tech. During his education, he performed research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland. He also partnered with and taught at TECH High, then a new metro-Atlanta charter high school. With support form the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and Center for the Advancement of Scholarship on Engineering Education (CASEE), he served as a post-doctoral fellow and Assistant Professor of Materials Engineering at the California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), San Luis Obispo.