Emlyn Hughes is a Professor of Physics at Columbia University. He holds an undergraduate degree from Stanford University and a PhD from Columbia, which he earned working at CERN with Nobel Laureate Jack Steinberger. Prior to returning to Columbia as a Professor in 2006, Hughes was a Professor of Physics at Caltech for 11 years.
Over the years, Professor Hughes’ research interests have spanned areas of atomic, nuclear and particle physics. He is currently a member of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC in Geneva, Switzerland. His ATLAS group has been involved in both hardware (pixel detector) and data analysis (studies of jets, photons and the Higgs) for the experiment. Prof. Hughes’ group is also involved in R&D activities on ultra-thin silicon detectors for future colliders, in collaboration with the Brookhaven National Laboratory and IPHC in Strasbourg, France. Additionally, a small effort exists in medical imaging, using polarized noble gases, in collaboration with the Columbia Medical School.
Professor Hughes is the winner of the Feynman Teaching Award (Caltech, 1999) and the ASCIT Teaching Award (Caltech, 1997). He was a recipient of a Panofsky Fellowship and a Sloan Fellowship, and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.