Sheree Hughes completed a Ph.D. in Health Sciences (Forensic Genetics) at Bond University on the Gold Coast in Australia, investigating forensic DNA typing methods for highly degraded samples such as those recovered from mass disasters, missing persons and historical cases in conjunction with DNA repair techniques and phenotypic SNP analysis. Hughes has been a faculty member at Sam Houston State University (SHSU) in Huntsville TX, where she also served as the Director of Graduate Programs, and was appointed by the Governor of Texas in 2015 to the Texas Forensic Science Commission. She returned to Australia to take up a position as a Senior Lecturer and head of the Forensic Biology Human Identification Laboratory at the University of Queensland. In Fall 2020, Hughes returns to SHSU as an Associate Professor of Forensic Science.