Professor Niu was awarded fellowship from three international societies, including American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, Air-conditioning Engineers(ASHRAE, 2013), International Society of Indoor Air Quality(ISIAQ, 2014), and International Society of Building Performance Simulation(IBPSA, 2015), and two professional societies – respectively Hong Kong Institution of Engineers(HKIE, 2011) and Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers(CIBSE, 2011). He was the sole recipient of PolyU President's Award for Excellent Performance/achievement in Research and Scholarly Activities in the year 2003, and the three-time recipient of faculty awards for winning high number of external competitive research grants. He was awarded the ASHRAE distinguished lecturer for two consecutive terms 2009 – 2013, and had been sponsored to give 8 invited lectures to ASHRAE member regions world-wide. He also delivered numerous invited presentations in international conferences and workshops.

He is the author and/or co-author of more than 300 technical publications, with 100+ refereed journal papers. He is the co-author of the WHO guideline (2009) Natural Ventilation for Infection Control in Health-Care Settings. He has successfully advised more than a dozen PhD students and Post-doctoral fellows. He is the inventor of two USA patents, respectively on personalized ventilation and thermal energy storage technologies, both of which won the Geneva Technology Invention awards. He is currently co-editor-in-chief of the Elsevier journal Energy and Buildings, after serving as an associate editor of the journal Building and Environment in the period from 2012 to 2014. He sits in the editorial board of Building Simulation, International Journal of Building Performance Simulation, International Journal of Sustainable Built Environment and several other journals. He served as vice-president of ISIAQ flag conference Indoor Air 2014.

Professor Niu serves as an Engineering panel member for the Research Grant Council(RGC) and a project reviewer for the Health and Medical Research Fund(HMRF), Hong Kong. He is a founding member of China affiliation of IBPSA, and served as the Hong Kong Chapter Technology Transfer Committee Chair, ASHRAE 2007/09. He is a recognized national expert on low-carbon technologies, and invited expert panel for the national 973 project Commercial Passenger Aircraft Cabin Air Quality Research. He was awarded Taishan Scholar by Shandong province in 2011. He is a consultant sought after by the industry, based-on qualification, for CFD(computational fluid dynamics) analysis of the cooling system design for datacenters.