Fred is Professor of Molecular Biology, with an associated appointment in the Department of Chemistry. In 1984, Fred received a B.S. in Molecular Biochemistry & Biophysics from Yale. In 1990, he earned his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Stanford for work on protein folding with Robert L. (Buzz) Baldwin. After postdoctoral research with Don Wiley at Harvard studying the crystal structure of influenza hemagglutinin in its activated, low-pH state, Fred joined the Princeton faculty in 1994. With the exception of a sabbatical at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge UK, he has been at Princeton ever since. Current research in the Hughson lab focuses on the multidisciplinary application of diverse tools, but especially single-particle cryoelectron microscopy and X-ray crystallography, to the study of two areas of cell biology – intracellular transport and bacterial cell-cell communication (quorum sensing).

Fred has taught both undergraduate and graduate courses. Since 2010, his primary teaching responsibility has been undergraduate biochemistry, for which he won the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2015. From 2006-2015, Fred served as director of the Princeton-HHMI Undergraduate Science Education Program. Over the years, he has been an NSF Graduate Fellow, a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow, a Searle Scholar, and a Beckman Young Investigator. Currently, Fred serves on the editorial boards for the journals Science and PLoS Biology. He is a fellow of Whitman College (Princeton) and a life member of Clare Hall (Cambridge UK).