Dr. Hu received his MD and PhD training at the Mayo Clinic where he devised the first staging scheme for TDP-43 pathology in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) which remains central to the neuropathologic description of limbic-associated TDP-43 encephalopathy.  He then undertook his translational fellowship in Cognitive Neurology and Neurodegenerative Diseases at University of Pennsylvania where he led the novel proteomic biomarker discovery/validation effort which continues to the focus of his laboratory.  He has been continuously funded by the NIH since 2013, and led the first modern biomarker study involving older African Americans while at Emory University.  His finding that older African Americans had lower cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) levels of tau-related biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease highlighted a major barrier to health equity, and he recently extended this finding to modern plasma tau biomarkers.  With a longstanding interest on the intersection between neurological and inflammatory pathways, he is a thought leader in the rigorous analysis –biochemically and statistically – of diverse CSF proteins to identify disease endophenotypes and inform disease mechanisms.  He has built a unique collection of CSF single cell transcriptomics paired with aptamer-based proteomics data in people with normal cognition and neurodegenerative diseases.  Recently, he used this novel combination of techniques to link CSF profiles of long COVID to persistent SARS-CoV-2 infection, and has been advocating for evidence-based anti-viral clinical trials for long COVID.  To further his goals of health equity, he also serves as the founding director for the Rutgers-NYU Resource Center for Alzheimer’s and Dementia Research in Asian and Pacific Americans (an NIA Resource Center for Minority Aging Research) and Rutgers Center for Healthy Aging Research, headed the Alzheimer’s Association Health Disparities Lexicon Work Group, designed/validated the first linguistically-appropriate neuropsychological tests among U.S.-based Chinese adults, and is testing novel strategies to remedy biomarker-related health disparities among African Americans.