Jia Hu

Dr. Jia Hu is the Associate Dean for Academics in the College of Agricultural Sciences and a Professor in Botany and Plant Pathology. Before joining OSU, she served as Assistant Dean for Graduate Education at the University of Arizona and Director of the Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center. At OSU, she collaborates with team members from the Academic Programs Office, Department Heads, and university leadership to deliver innovative curricula, expand experiential learning, and prepare students for meaningful, impactful careers.

Dr. Hu is a product and proud graduate of large public institutions of higher education. After emigrating from China as a young child, she grew up in northern California and attended the University of California Berkeley to pursue her undergraduate degree. While earning her degree in Integrative Biology, she took a transformative Plant Ecophysiology class that profoundly altered her research interests and career trajectory. After working for a couple of years as a lab technician, she entered the Ecology & Evolutionary Biology PhD Program at the University of Colorado where she combined physiological measurements with isotope data to study the movement of carbon and water through forests. She continued to study forest water-carbon dynamics as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric Research before focusing on water use efficiency in agricultural crops at the University of Sydney (Australia). Following her postdoctoral studies, Dr. Hu took a faculty position in the Department of Ecology at Montana State University as an Assistant Professor; four years later, she moved to the desert for a subsequent faculty position at the University of Arizona as an Associate Professor. 

As a Principal Investigator, she secured $9.93M in funding for her research, mentored graduate students that continue to make important academic and research contributions, and developed numerous highly regarded undergraduate and graduate courses. She has published nearly 50 peer-reviewed papers on a variety of topics from ecohydrology, plant physiological ecology, and terrestrial biogeochemistry.