Robert Edward Hughes (May 31, 1924 – April 2, 2017) was an American professor of physical chemistry at Cornell University, director of the Materials Science Center at Cornell, a U.S. Senate-confirmed assistant director of the National Science Foundation, and longtime president of Associated Universities that operated Brookhaven National Laboratories for the U.S. Department of Energy, and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the Very Large Array telescope in New Mexico, and the 100 meter radio telescope in Greenbank, West Virginia.
His thesis, and subsequent work with his mentor and colleague J. L Hoard,[2] led Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling to comment "This is the most beautiful structure I have ever seen".
[3] Of Hoard and Hughes paper on Tetragonal Boron Pauling wrote: "I think that it is one of the best crystal-structure determinations that has ever been made.
He headed the U.S. delegations to the Eighth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting in Oslo, Norway.
[7] AUI, founded by Isidor Rabi in 1946, a non-profit partnership between universities and the government to run Brookhaven National Laboratory, AUI also managed and operated for the NRAO the telescope at Greenbank West Virginia, and for the NSF the Very Large Array near Socorro NM, linked to a string of radio telescopes around the world.