Our Team

Richard Hughey

Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Education and Global Engagement

Richard Hughey has served as vice provost and dean of undergraduate education at UC Santa Cruz since 2011, providing leadership for key areas that shape the undergraduate experience—including academic advising, the colleges’ academic, admissions, financial aid, registrar, summer session, and the education partnership center. He also oversees the division of global engagement.

A professor of computer engineering and biomolecular engineering, Hughey earned his B.A. in mathematics and B.S. in engineering from Swarthmore College, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in computer science from Brown University. His research spans bioinformatics, parallel processing, and hidden Markov models, and he has published extensively in these fields. He is co-creator of the SAM sequence analysis package and has co-authored more than 50 publications.

Throughout his career, Hughey has been a strong advocate for undergraduate students. He has helped develop academic programs across engineering and the sciences, mentored student organizations such as the Society of Women Engineers and Tau Beta Pi, and led initiatives to expand undergraduate research opportunities. In recognition of his efforts to support diversity and inclusion, he received the UC Santa Cruz Chancellor’s Achievement Award for Diversity in 2008.