Biography

Dr. Dezhi Wu is a full professor in the Department of Integrated Information Technology, and the founding director of HI3 Tech Research Lab at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA. She earned her Ph. D. degree in Information Systems with a concentration on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA. She also obtained her "Human Factors" Certificate from the University of Michigan. She is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP). She is the former President for  the Association of Information Systems (AIS) Special Interest Group on HCI (SIGHCI) and is now serving as the SIGHCI's Advisory Board Member. She is the recipient of the globally prestigious technology award - "AIS Technology Challenge Award" and "SIGHCI Outstanding Service Award" issued by the AIS in 2011. In the past, she has won multiple university-level of faculty awards including "Outstanding Scholar of the Year" (2014), "Distinguished Scholarly/Creative Activity Award" (2017), "Distinguished Educator Award" (2018), "Campus Influencer Award" (2016), and "Quality Service Award" (2013) along with numerous college and departmental levels of outstanding faculty awards.

Dr. Wu is a passionate interdisciplinary scholar in the information technology field, especially as it pertains to the intersection of human-computer/AI interaction, health informatics, health IT,  cybersecurity,  biometrics, and other emerging technologies. Her academic work explores how users interact with  computer systems,  AI-driven technologies, robotics, and IoT smart devices to accomplish their goals. Her passion also extends to creating innovative intelligent user interfaces (UIs), user experiences (UX), and systems. She designs and evaluates novel transformative experiences for user engagement and behavior changes that fill the gaps to address socio-technical challenges between different types of users (i.e., patients, health providers, STEM learners, and cybersecurity trainees)  in multiple research domains, such as healthcare, cybersecurity, and education. 

Her recent research projects primarily focus on human-AI/robot interactions, explainable AI (XAI), conversational UI design, health informatics, health IT, social media analytics, and mobile security notification (MSN) systems.  

Through all this, Dr. Wu engages and inspires her students through experiential learning methods to foster their lifelong learning experiences.

On the media: Q & A with Associate Professor Dr. Dezhi Wu on March 30, 2021.