Dr. Hu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of the Built Environment at the National University of Singapore (NUS) since January 2024, leading the Building Informatics and Operations Research (BIOR) Lab. 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. Before that, he worked with Prof. David Wallom as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Engineering Science at University of Oxford from 2020 to 2021. 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 American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) and a member of International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA). He has been actively contributing to international collaborations, including the ongoing IEA EBC Annex 81 (Data-Driven Smart Buildings) and Annex 82 (Energy Flexible Buildings Towards Resilient Low Carbon Energy Systems).