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Hongru Du

Assistant Professor, Systems and Information Engineering
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About

Hongru Du is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Systems and Information Engineering at the University of Virginia. His research integrates systems engineering, artificial intelligence, and public health to develop AI-driven and computational frameworks that support data-informed health decision-making. He focuses on modeling human–disease interactions and improving the resilience and efficiency of health systems. Dr. Du is a founding contributor to the Johns Hopkins University CSSE COVID-19 Dashboard, one of the world’s most widely used pandemic tracking tools. His infectious disease forecasting models have supported the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in guiding national responses to COVID-19 and seasonal influenza outbreaks. He continues to advance computational methodologies that integrate human behavior into complex systems modeling, with the goal of improving preparedness and resilience to tackle broader societal challenges.

Education

Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University

M.Sc., University of Wisconsin-Madison

B.Sc., University of Edinburgh

B.Eng., Tianjin University

Research Interests

Data-driven Decision Making
Multimodal Machine Learning for Public Health
Human Behavior Modeling
Data-centric AI System
Infectious Disease Modeling

Selected Publications

Advancing real-time infectious disease forecasting using large language models. Nature Computational Science, pp.1-14. Du, H., Zhao, Y., Zhao, J., Xu, S., Lin, X., Chen, Y., Gardner, L.M. and Yang, H.F., 2025
Can a society of generative agents simulate human behavior and inform public health policy? A case study on vaccine hesitancy. Conference on Language Modeling (CoLM 2025). Hou, A. B., Du, H., Wang, Y., Zhang, J., Wang, Z., Liang, P. P., Khashabi, D., Gardner, L., & He, T. 2025
Towards Reliable and Interpretable Traffic Crash Pattern Prediction and Safety Interventions Using Customized Large Language Models. (AIP Nature Communications). Zhao, Y., Wang, P., Zhao, Y., Du, H. and Yang, H.F., 2025
Association between vaccination rates and COVID-19 health outcomes in the United States: a population-level statistical analysis. BMC Public Health, 24(1), p.220. Du, H., Saiyed, S. and Gardner, L.M., 2024
Incorporating variant frequencies data into short-term forecasting for COVID-19 cases and deaths in the USA: a deep learning approach. Ebiomedicine, 89. Du, H., Dong, E., Badr, H.S., Petrone, M.E., Grubaugh, N.D. and Gardner, L.M., 2023
An interactive web-based dashboard to track COVID-19 in real time. The Lancet infectious diseases, 20(5), pp.533-534. Dong, E., Du, H. and Gardner, L., 2020