Dr. Will Hughes, an expert in nanoscience and medical applications of DNA nanotechnology, joined the faculty of the Department of Materials Science & Engineering at Boise State University in 2008, and the Mountain States Tumor & Medical Research Institute at St. Luke's Regional Medical Center in Boise in 2010. Before coming to Boise, he was an assistant professor of materials engineering at the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, and a Center for the Advancement of Scholarship on Engineering Education post-doctoral fellow at the National Academy of Engineering in Washington, D.C. Dr. Hughes earned his Ph.D. at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and his B.S. from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. With grants from the W.M. Keck Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Dr. Hughes and his colleagues pursue DNA’s potential as an engineering material for building structural scaffolds for nanoelectronic devices and biochemical tools for diagnosing disease. He leads an interdisciplinary team of professors in chemistry, biology and engineering at Boise State as well as collaborators at the Boise Veterans Affairs Medical Center, St. Luke’s Mountain States Tumor and Medical Research Institute (MSTMRI), Idaho IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence and The Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. Dr. Hughes was instrumental in the development and evolution of the Nanoscale Materials and Device Group at Boise State, where students are provided the opportunity to develop their professional and technical skills while participating in cutting edge research. Dr. Hughes has found innovative ways for Materials Science students to impact their communities through Service-Learning projects including work with a homeless shelter, a botanical garden and farm, a children's recreation center, a science museum, and a zoo.
Articles & Conference Proceedings
How Can We Help Faculty Balance Between Teaching and Scholarly Activities? (with Cheryl Schrader, Seung Youn Chyung, Kotaro Sasaki, Teresa Cole, and John N. Chiasson), 118th ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, June 26-29, 2011, Vancouver, BC, Canada (2011)
Boise State University (BSU), which is among the fastest growing institutions of higher education in...
Operation of a DNA-Based Autocatalytic Network in Serum (with Elton Graugnard, Amber Cox, Jeunghoon Lee, Cheryl Jorcyk, and Bernard Yurke), DNA'10 Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on DNA Computing and Molecular Programming (2011)
The potential for inferring the presence of cancer by the detection of miRNA in human...
Cavity Resonant Mode in a Metal Film Perforated with Two-Dimensional Triangular Lattice Hole Arrays (with Wan Kuang, Alex English, William B. Knowlton, Jeunghoon Lee, and Bernard Yurke), Optics Communications (2010)
The transmission property of metallic films with two-dimensional hole arrays is studied experimentally and numerically....
Kinetics of DNA and RNA Hybridization in Serum and Serum-SDS (with Elton Graugnard, Amber Cox, Jeunghoon Lee, Cheryl Jorcyk, and Bernard Yurke), IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology (2010)
Cancer is recognized as a serious health challenge both in the United States and throughout...
Programmable Periodicity of Quantum Dot Arrays with DNA Origami Nanotubes (with Hieu Bui, Craig Onodera, Carson Kidwell, YerPeng Tan, Elton Graugnard, Wan Kuang, Jeunghoon Lee, William B. Knowlton, and Bernard Yurke), Nano Letters (2010)
To fabricate quantum dot arrays with programmable periodicity, functionalized DNA origami nanotubes were developed. Selected...
Patents
Probe Sensor with Multi-Dimensional Optical Grating (with Zhong L. Wang and Brent A. Buchine) (2010)
A displacement sensor employs an electromagnetic radiation source that generates a beam of electromagnetic radiation...
Probe Sensor with Multi-Dimensional Optical Grating (with Zhong L. Wang and Brent A. Buchine) (2010)
A displacement sensor employs an electromagnetic radiation source that generates a beam of electromagnetic radiation...
Probe Tips and Method of Making Same (with Zhong L. Wang and Brent A. Buchine) (2008)
A probe includes a substrate and a tetragonal structure disposed on the substrate that has...
Presentations