
Lu Zhong

I am an incoming Dartmouth Provost Fellow (Guarini Dean's Fellow) at Dartmouth College, where I will be primarily affiliated with the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, the Dartmouth Cancer Center, and the Irving Institute for Energy and Society. At Dartmouth, I will establish independent interdisciplinary research focused on healthcare resilience, integrating network science, artificial intelligence (AI), and public health.
My research aims to understand and strengthen the resilience of healthcare systems under disruptions. Healthcare systems face growing challenges from infectious disease outbreaks, pandemics, climate-related hazards, and other systemic disruptions. I investigate how healthcare systems prepare for, respond to, and recover from thesis crises across three interconnected scales: population-level responses, hospital operations, and individual continuity of care, with applications in rural health, cancer care, and pandemic preparedness. While grounded in healthcare, my research addresses broader challenges in complex socio-technical systems at the intersection of health, infrastructure, and environment.
My work combines computational network science, AI-driven modeling, graph machine learning, spatial analytics, and large-scale human mobility and electronic health record data. By combining methodological innovation with real-world healthcare applications, my research advances data-driven decision-making for healthcare preparedness, resource allocation, and health system resilience.
My work has been published in leading interdisciplinary journals, including Nature Medicine (2024), Nature Cities (2025), and Nature Communications Physics (2021), and has been supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation through a Research Accelerator Grant. I also serve as a reviewer for journals including IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, BMC Public Health, and Scientific Reports.
Prior to joining Dartmouth, I served as a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences at Clemson University and completed postdoctoral training in the Department of Computer Science and the Network Science and Technology Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (advised by Dr. Jianxi Gao). I received my Ph.D. in Data Science from the City University of Hong Kong (advised by Dr. Qingpeng Zhang).
Related links
News
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2026/06. New paper published by the Journal of The Royal Society Interface: Switching exploration modes in human mobility.
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2026/06. Lu presented her work at NetSci 2026.
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2026/06. Lu earned the certificate in AI Agents through The University of Texas at Austin Executive Education.
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2026/05. New paper shared in medRxiv: A spatial EHR and wastewater-informed modeling framework for respiratory virus prediction under sparse and missing data conditions.
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2026/04. Lu presents her work at the 2026 annual InsightNet meeting.
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2026/04. New paper shared in arXiv: Enhancing structural resilience in healthcare through patient flow network.
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2026/04. New paper published by PNAS Nexus: Persistent collaboration as a structural signature of scientific resilience
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2026/03. Lu won the CBSHS Research Development Award.
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2025/10. Lu presented her work at the Science for Health Systems Conference 2025.
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2025/10. Lu presented her work for the Clemson-MUSC AI Hub Annual Summit.
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2025/07. New paper published in Nature Cities: Universal expansion of human mobility across urban scales.
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2025/04. New paper shared in medRxiv: Examining inequality in healthcare utilization during pandemic disruptions
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2025/04. Lu joined Clemson University as a Research Assistant Professor.
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2025/04. Lu presented her work on patient flow network at the conference NERCCS 2025.
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2025/04. Congratulations to student Dimitri on receiving a PhD offer from Northeastern University's Network Science Institute!
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2025/01. Congratulations to Lu for having her newborn boy Dylan!