Professor Hughes attended Cornell University as an undergraduate, earning a B.A. in Physics in 1993. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from the California Institute of Technology, working with Professor Kip Thorne, and then did postdocs at the University of Illinois, Caltech, and the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics before joining the MIT Physics faculty in January 2003. Professor Hughes’ research is in astrophysical general relativity, focusing in particular on black holes and gravitational-wave sources.