Frank B Hu graduated from the Department of Health of Tongji Medical University in 1988. Since 1999, he has served as an assistant professor, associate professor, and tenured professor at Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School.

In 2005, he was concurrently Chair Professor of the School of Public Health, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

In 2014, he was appointed as a member of the Overseas Chinese Experts Advisory Committee by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council of China.

On October 19, 2015, he was elected member of the National Academy of Medicine of the United States.

Frank B Hu has applied for 5 projects of R01, with a total expenditure of more than 10 million US dollars. In recent years, he has published more than 350 SCI papers, including 6 in the New England Journal of Medicine (Impact Factor 52) and 19 in JAMA (Impact Factor 25), with more than 10,000 citations.

He has given more than 100 invited presentations at international conferences, is the technical editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, and is an editorial board member and reviewer of 50 journals including NEJM, JAMA, Lancel, BMJ, PLoS Med, and Circulation. He has been awarded more than 20 awards. Two of the papers were named among the 10 most outstanding papers by the American Heart Association in 1997 and 2002. In February 2008, Oxford Press published his monograph "The Epidemiology of Obesity".

Professor Hu also serves as a reviewer for 13 well-known international journals, especially the advisory editorial board of the New England Journal of Medicine. Moreover, he is a member of the Nurses' Health Study and director of four large NIH projects. His research confirmed the risk of trans fatty acids for heart disease (listed as one of the top 10 outstanding studies by the American Heart Association in 1997) and that moderately vigorous physical activity protects against diabetes.

He received the Boston Medical Foundation's Charles A. King Scholarship in 1998.The 71st American Heart Association Elizabeth Bartt-Connor Research Award, the 2010 Kelly West Distinguished Achievement Award of the American Diabetes Association, and has been the recipient of the American Heart Association's Top Ten Research Progress Award for two years.

He is also a member of the Global Committee on Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at the Institute of Medicine (IOM), the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) Obesity Expert Group, and the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.