He was educated at Tsinghua University in China (BSc - 1996; PhD - 2001) and has worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (Trieste, 2001-2003), the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (2003-2004) and the University of Queensland (2005). He was a chair professor of atomic, molecular, and optical physics at Renmin University of China (2006-2008). In addition, he was an Australian Research Council Queen Elizabeth II Fellow (2009-2013) and a Future Fellow (2014-2017) at Swinburne University of Technology. Hu became an elected fellow of the American Physical Society in 2016. His recent research interests focus on ultracold atoms and molecules, and the theory of quantum fluids.