Professor Mark Hughes graduated in Biology and Chemistry from St. Johns University followed by a Masters in Biophysics at Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biochemistry at the University of Arizona Medical Center. He continued his training at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston as a postdoctoral fellow with Bert O’Malley, where his pivotal work was published in Science and Nature. Following this training Hughes completed his M.D. at Baylor, followed by house staff training in Internal Medicine and clinical subspecialty training at Duke University. He then returned as junior faculty to Baylor’s newly formed Genetics Institute led by Thomas Caskey and Arthur Beaudet. Among his accomplishments was the realization that single cells could be molecularly data mined for diagnostic advantage: This led to a multi-year collaboration with reproductive endocrinologists and embryologists at the Hammersmith and UCLondon; the field of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis was born. In 1993 Hughes’ research was recognized by Science magazine as being one of the “ten most significant advances” in all of science that year; spanning all the physical, biological and mathematical sciences for that year.
It was then that Professor Hughes was recruited to be one of the first 11 members of the Human Genome Institute at NIH. The Genome Project was getting underway and Hughes was recruited to lead the section on Translational Genomic Diagnostics. He also was named chair of Human Genetics at Georgetown University. Doctor Hughes then moved to Michigan to take a position as Professor and Director of Molecular Medicine and Genetics, Professor of OB-Gyn, and Professor of Pathology at Wayne State. He was named as the Director of the State of Michigan’s ‘Life Sciences Genomics Hub’, a joint state-wide project with the University of Michigan and Michigan State University.