Ivana Nikolic Hughes

Dr. Ivana Nikolić Hughes is a Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Chemistry  and Director of Frontiers of Science, a core science course for Columbia College. Additionally, she serves as President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, an organization that educates and advocates for a world free of nuclear weapons. Hughes holds a BS with Honors from Caltech, where she studied chemical engineering and completed her Senior Thesis with Prof. Frances Arnold. She obtained her PhD from Stanford University, where she was an American Heart Association Predoctoral Fellow, working in the laboratory of Prof. Dan Herschlag. She has been a faculty member at Columbia University since 2008 and was awarded the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award for 2020. Her work on ascertaining the radiological conditions in the Marshall Islands, the site of US nuclear testing, has been covered widely. Hughes currently serves as a member of the Scientific Advisory Group to the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. In addition to her scholarly writing, she has published in The Nation, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The Hill, Scientific American, Truthout, Common Dreams, Transcend Media Service, The Diplomat, and elsewhere.