Zoe Hughes is a coastal oceanographer and geomorphologist and is an Assistant Research Professor at Boston University, where she has worked since 2004. She began her career looking at tidal inlets and sandy barriers but has since expanded to other coastal systems, including estuarine and marsh systems along the Gulf of Mexico and Eastern Seaboard of the US. Through modeling and field data collection, she researches the interaction of hydrodynamics and sediment transport along coastlines, especially shorelines that incorporate channelized systems such as salt marshes.