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Dr. Will Hughes leads UBCO’s next generation of engineers

June 30, 2022

THROUGHOUT HIS CAREER, Dr. Will Hughes has been a champion of the field of engineering, working tirelessly to expose the discipline to as many people as possible in order to serve the greater good.

“Engineering is a remarkably creative field. It is also, at times, exclusionary based on who does and doesn’t feel at home with its content or culture,” explains Dr. Hughes, the new Director of UBC Okanagan’s School of Engineering. “More perspectives and lived experiences are needed to responsibly address yesterday’s faults, today’s challenges and tomorrow’s opportunities. Only then can the natural creativity and full capacity of engineering become a reality.”

Now, as Dr. Hughes joins the Okanagan community, he does so with an eye toward how the School of Engineering can support its people, our planet and our profits.

His emerging vision for the School is to model civil discourse promoting respect and compassion, while creating an inclusive environment that creates real opportunities for upward mobility. He also aims to generate original work that confronts locally relevant and globally significant problems, while prioritizing competitive workforce development to prepare the next generation of engineers in the Okanagan.

Outside of his administrative role, Dr. Hughes’ earned his Bachelor of Science and his doctorate—both in Materials Science and Engineering—before undertaking a National Academy of Engineering Postdoctoral Fellowship within the Center for the Advancement of Scholarship on Engineering Education in the United States.

“More perspectives and lived experiences are needed to responsibly address yesterday’s faults, today’s challenges and tomorrow’s opportunities. Only then can the natural creativity and full capacity of engineering become a reality.”

His current research involves developing technologies made from DNA, using the structural integrity, information density and programmability of life’s most basic material. Such technologies range from engineering low-cost liquid computers that perform early stage diagnostics of hard-to-detect diseases, to storing extremely dense and stable information for archival applications. Using the triple-bottom-line as a guide, Dr. Hughes and his multidisciplinary team have always been committed to the social, environmental and financial impacts of their work.

In collaboration with the Micron School of Materials Science & Engineering at Boise State, Harvard University, and the Semiconductor Research Corporation, Dr. Hughes coined the field Nucleic Acid Memory. He then envisioned and contributed to the semiconductor synthetic biology roadmap to steer semiconductor investments in a post Moore’s Law world.

“Moore’s Law suggests that the power of computers and electronics doubles every two years,” explains Dr. Hughes. He sees a similar growth in the power of inclusion, community and engineering. He envisions the School of Engineering as both a welcoming place and creative space where engineering is a verb, not a noun.

“I see in the people around me what a few people saw in me—potential energy. The potential to serve our community one person, one idea and one expression at a time by helping create the conditions for responsible growth and innovation to happen at scale.”