His main research area is clinical electrophysiology, neural engineering, and biomedical signal processing, hardware implementation for signal processing.

Dr. Hu was awarded several prizes for his academic contributions. His paper was awarded Oldendorf Award for the best manuscript in the 34th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Neuroimaging 2011, Cum Laude Best Poster Award in SPIE Medical Imaging conference 2011 and the best paper for 2008 in Anaesth Intensive Care. He was awarded U21 fellowship in 2013, HKU overseas fellowship in 2012 respectively. In 2006 and 2007, he was awarded Macnab/Larocca Research Fellowship twice from the International Society for the Study of the Lumbar Spine (ISSLS) in his study on Using topography of surface EMG for low back pain assessment. His work on time-frequency analysis of SEP has been selected into the The Yearbook of Medical Informatics 2003.