Lu Hu, PhD

Dr. Lu Hu is a behavioral scientist and an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Excellence in Health Equity and Department of Population Health at NYU Langone Health. Her research primarily focuses on developing and testing innovative, sustainable, and scalable technology-based interventions to increase access to care and reduce health disparities in underserved populations with chronic conditions. 

Dr. Hu received a NIH funded K99/R00 award to examine the feasibility, acceptability, and potential efficacy of a culturally and linguistically tailored social media-based intervention to improve care access and reduce health disparities in low-income Chinese immigrants with type 2 diabetes (T2D). She is also leading another extramurally funded P30 pilot award to examine the feasibility of a family-based mobile health (mHealth) intervention in Chinese immigrants with T2D. Recently, she received two R01-level grants to examine the effectiveness and implementation of a multi-level mHealth intervention to promote health equity in low-income Chinese immigrants with T2D. 

In addition, Dr. Hu has extensive experience in serving as a co-investigator or collaborator on multiple NIH or foundation supported grants. For example, she was a co-investigator on an Aetna-funded study involving the use of a mHealth intervention (e.g., text messages) to remotely titrate the insulin regimen in underserved low-income patients with uncontrolled T2D. Dr. Hu has been also actively collaborating in a recently completed R01 study that aimed to evaluate the efficacy of 3 different technology-supported approaches to engaging individuals with T2D and concurrent chronic kidney disease in making lifestyle changes. More recently, she has been collaborating in two R01 level initiatives to examine the effect of a machine learning based personalized nutrition intervention on weight loss and diabetes management. 

Dr. Hu’s work has been recognized by multiple awards and honors, including a 2021 American Diabetes Association Young Investigator Award, a 2017 NYU Grossman School of Medicine Outstanding Postdoc Award, and a 2016 NIMHD Health Disparities Research Institute Scholar. 

In summary, Dr. Hu has extensive experience in improving access to chronic disease care, digital/mHealth interventions, health disparities research, lifestyle intervention, and immigrant health. She has methodological expertise in cultural adaptation of evidence-based interventions, clinical trials, mixed methods, community-based participatory research, and systematic review and meta-analysis.