Biography

Dr. Dezhi Wu is a tenured full professor in the Department of Integrated Information Technology, the founding director of HI3 Tech Research Lab, and AI Lead for the Institute of Rural Education and Development (IRED) at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA. She earned her Ph.D. degree in Information Systems with a concentration in 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 for Information Systems (AIS) Special Interest Group on HCI (SIGHCI) and is now a member of the SIGHCI Advisory Board. She is the recipient of the globally prestigious technology award, the "AIS Technology Challenge Award," and the "SIGHCI Outstanding Service Award," both issued by 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 information technology, particularly at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI), human-computer/AI/robotics interaction, health informatics, health IT, cybersecurity, biometrics, and other emerging technologies. She designs and evaluates novel AI-driven systems to deliver transformative experiences that fill significant scientific gaps and address critical socio-technical challenges, with implications for both theory and practice. Through human-in-the-loop approaches, she designs novel AI technologies to bridge gaps among humans, cognitive science, and user interface (UI)/user experience (UX) design. She also identifies interaction patterns to uncover the underlying mechanisms of adaptive user engagement and adoption when users interact with AI technologies and smart sensors/devices to achieve positive behavioral changes.

Her current research projects primarily focus on human-centered AI, human-AI/Robotics interaction,  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, large language models (LLMs), and agentic AI/LLM methods to automatically detect users' health behaviors and associated adverse health events, and develop personalized and adaptive intervention programs or services. She also conducts AI in STEM Education research via creating XAI-driven learning platforms for complex problem-solving, immersive virtual and mixed reality learning platforms to improve STEM education, and mobile security notification (MSN) systems to enhance user security compliance. Her latest AI research focuses on designing and evaluating multi-Agentic AI ecosystems at the intersection of AI and healthcare. 

Through all this, Dr. Wu engages and inspires her students through experiential learning, fostering lifelong learning.

In the media: 

• National Big Data Health Science 2026 Student Case Competition Second-Place Winner News on April 7, 2026. 

• Goldwater Scholar Award in 2024.

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