Biography

Dr. Dezhi Wu is a tenured 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 of  the Association of Information Systems (AIS) Special Interest Group on HCI (SIGHCI) and is now a SIGHCI 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 faculty awards, including "the  University of South Carolina Creed Champion Award Winner" (2025) "for making significant and extraordinary contributions to the Carolina community while embodying the values exposed in the Carolina Creed," "Distinguished Educator Award" (2018), "Distinguished Scholarly/Creative Activity Award" (2017), "Campus Influencer Award" (2016), and "Outstanding Scholar of the Year" (2014), 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 artificial intelligence (AI), human-computer/AI interaction, health informatics, health IT, neuroscience, cybersecurity, biometrics, mixed reality, and other emerging technologies. She designs and evaluates novel AI-driven systems for transformative experiences that fill the significant scientific gaps to address critical socio-technical challenges and make societal impacts in multiple research domains with theoretical and practical implications, such as AI in healthcare and medicine,  AI in STEM education, and AI in cybersecurity. Through user-centered approaches, she designs novel AI technologies to bridge the gaps between technologies and humans via affective computing, AI, cognitive science, and optimal user interface (UI)/ user experience (UX) designs. She also identifies interaction patterns to uncover underlying in-depth user engagement and adoption mechanisms when users interact with computer systems, AI-driven technologies, and smart sensors/devices to accomplish their goals. Her passion also extends to creating innovative, intelligent UI/UX and data-driven infrastructure-level front-end and back-end systems for adaptive user engagement and personalized services that lead to positive behavior changes for better well-being, health,  learning, user satisfaction, and compliance outcomes.  

Her current research projects primarily focus on human-AI interactions,  AI in healthcare and medicine, and  health informatics, especially on the design of AI-driven health intervention programs for patients and clinical decision support systems for clinicians,  using social media analytics and AI methods to automatically detect users' health behaviors and adverse health events to design AI-driven public surveillance tools. She also conducts  explainable AI (XAI) for STEM education  research to create XAI-driven learning platforms for complex problem-solving, immersive virtual reality and mixed reality learning platforms for improving STEM education, and mobile security notification (MSN) systems for more positive user security compliance. Her latest AI research focuses on designing multimodal chatbot systems at the intersection of AI and neuroscience through more adaptive large language models (LLMs) and NeuroAI UI/UX methods to support neurodivergent youth in being ready for the workforce. 

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

On the media: 

• Goldwater Scholar Award in 2024

• Q & A with Associate Professor Dr. Dezhi Wu on March 30, 2021.