Thomas J. R. Hughes earned his Ph.D. in engineering science from the University of California, Berkeley. He is professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics, holder of the Peter O'Donnell, Jr. Chair in Computational and Applied Mathematics, and leader of the ICES Computational Mechanics Group.

He joined UT Austin in 2002. He was previously a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, the California Institute of Technology, and Stanford University, where he served as chairman of the Division of Applied Mechanics and chairman of the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

His research interests are in computational mechanics, isogeometric analysis, stabilized and variational multiscale methods, phase-field modeling, cardiovascular bioengineering, complex fluids, and turbulence.

Hughes is one of the most widely cited authors in scientific computing. He has received numerous national and international awards for his research. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a foreign member of the Royal Society, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the Istituto Lombardo Accademia di Scienze e Lettere. Hughes has received honorary doctorates from the following universities: A Coruña, Louvain, Pavia, Padua, Trondheim, and Northwestern.