Conrad Hughes has been a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh since January 2003 (time of writing: November 2006), mainly working on DIRC's "dependable service-centric grid computing" activity, but with additional projects including epidemic visualisation for the World Health Organisation's Field Information Management System (FIMS) and database synchronisation technology for the NHS in Scotland. He has a BA in Mathematics (I, Trinity College, University of Dublin, 1996) and before joining the university had over a decade's experience of commercial IT work ranging from teaching through cryptography and public key infrastructure to fault-tolerant distributed systems.

His research-related interests include all kinds of programming and mathematical puzzles, software development methodology, programming languages, technology-in-context, interdisciplinarity, games and holism.