About

Timothy Hughes is a molecular geneticist whose fundamental goal is to understand how the genome is deciphered by cells, in human and other organisms.

Often described as a “blueprint,” the genome is in fact a highly encoded instruction set – there is no simple mapping between the genome and the organism, and this shortcoming means that the function of the vast majority of the human genome is incomprehensible to us. As a first step, Hughes is decoding the sequences that are recognized by the thousands of proteins that bind DNA and RNA and regulate gene activity, and using these data to build computational models of global gene regulation. A long-term goal of his research is to enable meaningful interpretation of human sequence variation and mutations, and to enable targeted modulation of cellular processes that are altered in disease.