Dr. Hu joined the faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at University of Alberta in 2010. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from Electrical Engineering Department, University of California, Los Angeles, and his M.Eng and B.Eng degrees both from Computer Science Department at Tsinghua University, China.

His current research interests mainly focus on Electronic Design Automation (EDA) for Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Particularly, his recent research thrust is the development of minimal-overhead (area, performance, power and design flow) automatic synthesis tools for fault-tolerant FPGA-based designs, considering the soft error in the Nano-scale CMOS technology and the manufacture defects in the emerging devices.

He is also interested at emerging technologies-enabled applications, including Wireless Healthcare and Pervasive Computing. He was one of the founding members in the engineering team of Perseus Medical Technologies, a startup company developing the state-of-the-art endoscope. The Perseus team is the winner of the first prize of Knapp Business Plan Competition 2009.

Dr. Hu is the recipient of the Best Contribution Award at the 3rd IEEE Programming Challenge at the International Workshop of Logic Synthesis for the implementation (together with my partner Mr. Victor Shih) of FPGA synthesis algorithms in OpenAccess Gear in 2008, and the outstanding graduate student award of Tsinghua University in 2005. His work for fault-tolerant FPGA synthesis has been nominated twice for the Best Paper Award at International Conference on Computer-Aided Design in 2008 and 2009.