Rate My Professor Yao Hu

Yao Hu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences (primary appointment) and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Delaware, where he joined in March 2020. He also serves as affiliated faculty in the Engineering and Public Policy Program, Water Science and Policy Program, and Data Science Institute. Prior to this, Hu was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, from August 2016 to February 2020, focusing on decision tools for agricultural nutrient application and nutrient loading impacts on Lake Erie. He briefly held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications from February to July 2016, developing a Geo-semantic Framework for data and models integration. Earlier roles include Research Assistant at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering from 2010 to 2016, Junior Researcher at UFZ Environmental Research Centre in Germany, and Research Assistant at Hamburg University of Technology. His educational background comprises a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2016), with a dissertation on agent-based models coupling natural and human systems for watershed management; an M.S. in Environmental Engineering from Hamburg University of Technology (2008); and dual Bachelor's degrees in Civil Engineering and Computer Science from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (2006).

Hu's research interests encompass socio-hydrology, agent-based modeling, model coupling and integration, water system modeling analysis and optimization, causal inference, high-performance and cloud computing, data science, and cyberinfrastructure. He has obtained funding as principal investigator, co-investigator, or sub-PI on projects including the Department of Defense's Military DEEDS Project (2022-2025, approximately $240,000 for a PhD student), NSF DISES on groundwater sustainability in changing climates (candidate's share $261,172), NOAA collaborations on runoff risk prediction ($50,000-$65,000 and $90,000), and University of Delaware Research Foundation grants. Key publications include 'Are all data useful? Inferring causality to predict flows across sewer and drainage systems using Directed Information and Boosted Regression Trees' (Water Research, 2018); 'Urban Total Phosphorus Loads to the St. Clair-Detroit River System' (Journal of Great Lakes Research, 2019); 'Edge-of-field Runoff Prediction by a Hybrid Modeling Approach Using Causal Inference' (Environmental Research Communications, 2021); 'Combining human and machine intelligence to derive agents’ behavioral rules for groundwater irrigation' (Advances in Water Resources, 2017); and several on sensitivity analysis and web-based modeling in Environmental Modelling & Software and Groundwater (2015). His scholarship has garnered over 225 citations per Google Scholar. Hu has presented at American Geophysical Union meetings, World Environment and Water Resources Congress, and European Geosciences Union on topics such as runoff risk, socio-hydrological modeling, and groundwater behaviors.