Hu was employed at AT&T's Bell Laboratories from 1975 to 1984, when she joined University of California, Santa Barbara as a full professor, a position she has held since 1984. She served UCSB's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as vice chair from 1989 to 1992 and as chair from 1992 to 1994. In 2008, Hu was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences. She has been a pioneer in the fabrication of nanoscale electronic and photonic devices, and was named Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering in Harvard University's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, effective January 1, 2009. She has also served since 2000 as scientific co-director of the California NanoSystems Institute, a joint initiative at UCSB and the University of California, Los Angeles. Hu has made major contributions to nanotechnology by designing and creating complex nanostructures. Her work has focused on nanoscale devices made from compound semiconductors and on novel devices made by integrating various materials, both organic and inorganic. She has also created nanophotonic structures that might someday facilitate quantum computing. Hu's seminal work in nanofabrication has included high-resolution patterning and high-resolution etching of circuits onto nanoscale materials. She has also developed biological approaches to nanotechnology, using biological assembly pathways to control the composition and structure of novel devices. Some of her research ideas led to her co-founding of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Cambrios Technology, a start-up that is developing new, cost-effective materials of importance for electronic device applications. At UCSB, she has led the Institute for Quantum Engineering, Science and Technology, the National Science Foundation-funded Center for Quantized Electronic Structures and Center for Robotic Systems in Microelectronics, and the UCSB component of the National Science Foundation's National Nanofabrication Users Network. According to a winter 2012 online news story article released by the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Hu is exploring the use of gallium nitride wafers at the nano-scale level in the formation and use of quantum dots in nanophotonics, which could eventually find use in smartphone screens and the fluorescent tagging of biological cells for their study in health and disease. Hu is a reviewing editor at the journal Science.
