Mike Hughes named Wittich Family Assistant Professor

Assistant Professor Michael C. Hughes (“Mike”) of the Department of Computer Science has been named the Wittich Family Assistant Professor. Established in 2019 as the Bright Futures Assistant Professorship, the newly renamed Wittich Family Professorship supports the teaching, research, service, and other activities of the School of Engineering faculty.

Hughes is a core faculty member of the Tufts Machine Learning Group. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brown University and later completed a postdoctoral fellowship in computer science at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Hughes’s research focuses on methodological advances in machine learning (ML) as well as applications of ML in healthcare. His lab's goal is to develop predictive and explanatory models that reveal structure in large, messy datasets and guide decision-making under uncertainty. His interests span probabilistic models, Bayesian inference, variational methods, time-series analysis, and semi-supervised learning.

His research has been supported by several prestigious grants. In August 2025, he and his colleague, cardiologist Dr. Benjamin Wessler from Tufts School of Medicine, won a five-year NIH R01 award to develop new strategies for detecting heart valve disease. In summer 2024, Hughes was honored with a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award, recognizing his pioneering work in machine learning and predictive modeling. The award, one of the NSF’s most competitive grants for early-career faculty, supports both groundbreaking research and the development of faculty as mentors and leaders in their fields. Hughes is also part of a NSF-funded 10-investigator team at Tufts seeking to better understand how students navigate confusion in STEM education. 

Hughes’s recent research tackles tough healthcare problems like the opioid crisis or predicting risk of stroke from neuroimaging scans, while also exploring broader topics like whooping crane conservation or modeling basketball team movement over time. His work has been featured in leading venues such as the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), and the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS). He actively mentors 4 PhD students, one postdoctoral scholar, and more than a half dozen MS and undergraduate researchers. He is passionate about helping talented students get involved with research. This past summer, Hughes served as the faculty co-director of the NSF-funded DIAMONDS program that provides grad-school-level research experiences to undergraduates on Tufts’ campus. 

With his appointment as Wittich Family Assistant Professor, Hughes will continue advancing innovative machine learning research while inspiring students at the intersection of computation and real-world impact.

Learn more about Wittich Family Assistant Professor Michael Hughes.