Duke D Hughes

Bio

Duke Hughes joined the Second Target Station (STS) Project July 1, 2023 as STS Project Manager. He brings over 20 years of progressive experience leading cross-functional teams to deliver project objectives, in both engineering and manufacturing environments, through all phases of projects. 

Prior to assuming this position, Hughes spent 8 years in roles of increasing responsibility on the US ITER Project, a DOE O 413.3b project managed by ORNL, culminating in the role of Manufacturing Systems Manager. In that role, he was responsible for establishing and delivering against the performance baseline for five technical teams representing ~$1.8B worth of project scope.

Before joining US ITER, Hughes accumulated more than 10 years of engineering management, project management, and manufacturing experience in a variety of industry settings. Much of this was spent in progressive roles with Centrus Energy (formerly USEC, Inc) in Oak Ridge, delivering front-end uranium enrichment technology (advanced gas centrifuge) for nuclear power. This included the design and delivery of gas centrifuge hardware, but also capital procurement and facilities projects. 

As an individual contributor, Duke has worked as a manufacturing process engineer for the Walt Disney Company, and BWXT Y-12 supporting a variety of complex manufacturing activities. Hughes holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering with a minor in materials science and a master’s in mechanical engineering from the University of Florida. He participated in the 2020 Cohort of the Project Leadership Institute (PLI) and is a certified project management professional (PMP).