Current group members

Scott A. Hughes (Principal investigator)
Devin Becker (Graduate student)
Amanda Peake (Graduate student)
Leaf (Mascot)

Interested in joining?

Unfortunately, we do not have opportunities for new graduate students in our group, and do not anticipate this changing. Funding and time are in particularly short supply: the funding agencies which support much of our work are undergoing existential changes in the way that they operate, and PI Hughes has taken on substantial and time-consuming departmental leadership responsibilities. Given these circumstances, we are unlikely to take on new students for the foreseeable future.

As time permits, we try to have regular UROP involvement in our group’s activities. Time has been quite short recently due to the PI’s departmental role, but one can always ask.

We do not at present have funding to support a new postdoc. I am happy to discuss possibilities related to certain MIT fellowships (e.g., the Pappalardo Fellowship, the Kavli Fellowship), though (especially regarding the Pappalardo) I may not be able to offer much concrete advice. It may also be possible to host an external fellowship, though please be aware that sometimes such fellowships involve various costs that I may not be able to cover. Please email Hughes if you are interested in exploring anything related to these issues.

We regularly receive requests to join the Hughes research group for a short “internship” from people outside of MIT. Please note that unless there is a pre-existing research relationship (e.g., Hughes or another group member is collaborating with your group), we do not take ever take anyone on in such a fashion. The short timeframe requested is not long enough for someone to make a meaningful contribution to ongoing work; and, if we have time to supervise a new student, it will be an MIT student. Working with MIT students is our top priority.

Alumni

Postdocs formerly hosted by the Hughes group:
Joel Franklin (now Professor, Reed College)
Samaya Nissanke (now Lead Scientist, DESY and the German Center for Astrophysics)
Ilya Mandel (now Professor, Monash University)
Nicolás Yunes (now Professor, University of Illinois)
Niels Warburton (now Lecturer/Assistant Professor, University College Dublin)
Robert Penna (now Assistant Professor, Suny Polytechnic Institute)
Carl Rodriguez (now Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina)
Lionel London (now Proleptic Lecturer, King’s College London)
Christopher Munna (now at InstaDeep, Ltd)

Graduate students who received a degree in the Hughes group:
Steve Drasco (now with Voloridge Investment Management)
Marc Favata (now Professor, Montclair State University)

(Note: Drasco and Favata were students of Éanna Flanagan at Cornell University, but worked very closely with Hughes during their PhD.)

Nathan Collins (now Science Writer and Communications Strategist, Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, Stanford University)
Ryan Lang (now Instructor, MIT Concourse)
Pranesh Sundararajan (now working in private equity management)
Leo Stein (now Associate Professor, University of Mississippi)
Sarah Vigeland (now Associate Professor, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
Stephen O’Sullivan (now Bay Area Machine Learning/Data Scientist)
Uchupol Ruangsri (now at Princess Chulabhorn College of Medical Science)
Halston Lim (now at Jump Trading)
Lisa Drummond (now Burke Fellow, Caltech)

Undergraduate researchers who formerly worked in the Hughes group:
Akash Kansagra (class of 2004)
Joel Corbo (class of 2004)
Pei-Lan Hsu (class of 2005)
TR Jordan (class of 2007)
J. Colin Hill (class of 2008)
TJ Torres (class of 2008)
William Throwe (class of 2010)
Hugo Marrochio (class of 2011)
Peter Reinhardt (class of 2012)
Bidisha Sen (class of 2019)
Anuj Apte (class of 2020)
Alexandra Hanselman (class of 2020)
Talya Klinger (class of 2020)
Gustavo Velez (class of 2020)
Karna Morey (class of 2022)
Aidan Leonard (class of 2025)
Diego Andrés Rivera Orona (class of 2026)