Alicia Hughes

Associate Dean of Student Affairs

Education

B.S., Texas Southern University, Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering

J.D., University of Miami School of Law

Career Highlights

By way of background, Dean Alicia R. Hughes received a B.S. in Biology with dual minors in Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering from Texas Southern University, where she was a Douglass Honors Institute Scholar (full academic scholarship), an international champion debater and team vice president, a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Undergraduate Researcher at Baylor College of Medicine (and became the MARC/NIH Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher), and Student Government Association President.

After taking two gap years and working as a middle school science teacher in a suburban Houston school district, Dean Hughes attended and earned her Juris Doctor from the University of Miami School of Law, where she was in the inaugural class of Miami Scholars, served on the editorial board of the University of Miami School of Law International and Comparative Law Review, was a member of the International Moot Court Board and Jessup National Trial Team, and served as President of the University of Miami School of Law Black Law Students Association (BLSA), becoming Parliamentarian of the National BLSA.

As a parting gift to Miami Law, Dean Hughes worked alongside her law school mentor to found the law school’s first formalized mentoring program. It benefitted Black law students in an effort to diversity the bar 25 years ago and was the imprimatur for what is now the State of Florida’s premier mentoring program across all law schools, more broadly, for all minority students, that garnered one of the American Bar Association’s earlier diversity awards.

In addition to her degrees, Dean Hughes is a University of Virginia Sorensen Institute Fellow in Political Leadership and an Aspen Institute Rodel Fellow in Public Leadership, and she has completed doctoral coursework toward an Executive Ed.D. in Higher Education Management at the University of Pennsylvania.

Separately, Dean Hughes completed a federal judicial clerkship in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, after working in a large Florida law firm immediately upon law school graduation. She is a former congressional staffer, having co-founded the Congressional Universal Health Care Task Force, an imprimatur to ObamaCare, while a law student, and she is a former public official, both a local elected city councilor in the home of the first U.S. President, General George Washington, making history as the 10th woman and 8th Black in more than 250 years, and a governor-appointed commissioner on three statewide bodies.

Dean Hughes formally affiliated with the academy for the first time during the pandemic as a lecturer in business law at the University of Texas at Austin. She has been privileged to teach at Widener University’s Delaware Law School, be visiting faculty at Boston University School of Law and Emory University School of Law, where she primarily taught and advised in the patent law space (her primary trained specialization). Her patent law students at Emory were western regional champions in the USPTO Patent Application Drafting Competition and ranked as a top 5 team in the nation.

In addition to her work as visiting faculty, Dean Hughes served as inaugural executive director of Emory’s Center on Civil Rights and Social Justice.

Dean Hughes is a daughter of the South, born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee. As a result of her experiences, she has an enduring appreciation for the legal culture, professionalism, and collegiality that define practice in the region and, as a 5th generation educator, a profound commitment to the well-being of students.

Dean Hughes is a former Chief Policy Advisor of the National Bar Association.