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 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 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, 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, especially at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI), human-computer/AI interaction, health informatics, health IT, cybersecurity, mixed reality, and other emerging technologies. She designs and evaluates novel AI-driven systems for transformative experiences that fill significant scientific gaps to address critical socio-technical challenges and make societal impacts across multiple research domains, with theoretical and practical implications, such as AI in healthcare and medicine, AI in STEM education, and AI in cybersecurity. Through human-in-the-loop approaches, she designs novel AI technologies to bridge the gap between humans and technology, drawing on AI, cognitive science, and user interface (UI)/ user experience (UX) design. She also identifies interaction patterns to uncover the underlying mechanisms of in-depth user engagement and adoption when users interact with 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, driving positive behavioral changes for well-being, health, learning, and compliance.  

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, large language models (LLMs), and agentic AI/LLM methods to automatically detect users' health behaviors and adverse health events and develop personalized intervention programs or services. She also creates 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 multi-Agentic AI systems at the intersection of AI and healthcare. 

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

In the media: 

• Goldwater Scholar Award in 2024

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