Dr. Hu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of the Built Environment at the National University of Singapore (NUS) since 2024. He is the director of the Building Informatics and Operations Research (BIOR) Lab and the deputy director of the NUS Center for Digital Building Technology. Prior to joining NUS, Dr. Hu was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Energy Science & Engineering at Stanford University from 2022 to 2023, advised by Prof. Sally Benson, and in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford from 2020 to 2021, advised by Prof. David Wallom. He received his PhD degree in Building Environment and Energy Engineering from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2019, advised by Prof. Linda Xiao. In 2018, he studied as a guest PhD student with Prof. John Bagterp Jørgensen in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at the Technical University of Denmark.

His research focuses on developing sustainable and scalable technologies and computational tools to make today’s building and urban energy systems low-carbon, energy-efficient, energy-flexible, climate-resilient, and equitable. To achieve this overarching goal, he employs a multifaceted approach that encompasses data analytics & machine learning, physics-based modeling & simulation, optimization & model-based optimal controls, and experiments. These approaches have been deployed across a spectrum of scales, spanning from equipment- through building- and community- to city-scale.

Dr. Hu is a member of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) and a member of the International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA). He has been contributing to international collaborations, including the IEA EBC Annex 81 (Data-Driven Smart Buildings), Annex 82 (Energy Flexible Buildings Towards Resilient Low Carbon Energy Systems) and Annex 96 (Grid Integrated Control of Buildings).