Work in progress includes a study of neutron stars with color-flavor-locked quark fluid cores; a study of the influence of spin-curvature coupling upon compact body orbits around Kerr black holes; and the study of radiative backreaction and gravitational-wave generation for compact objects captured by massive black holes.

A common thread through much of this work is the use (or abuse) of general relativistic perturbation theory.

Biographical Sketch
Professor Hughes attended Cornell University as an undergraduate, earning a B.A. in Physics in 1993. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from the California Institute of Technology, working with Professor Kip Thorne. After spending one year working in computational relativity at the University of Illinois, he returned to Caltech as a postdoc and instructor in the Physics Department. Professor Hughes then spent two and half years as a postdoc in the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, before moving to MIT in January 2003.