Ruey Hu seems indefatigable. Even after a workday as a fellow in interventional cardiology at the Yale School of Medicine, Toronto-born Hu is chipper and open.
His placid energy may be part of what’s helped him build such a thick CV. At 31, he’s published more than 45 manuscripts, including on metabolites that he found correspond to specific symptoms of severe kidney disease. Hu is a winner of many awards, including the National Kidney Foundation’s National Young Investigator Award, and was voted a top fellow at Yale. And he’s been recognized for an innovative AI tool he created with collaborators that gives clinicians an “instant consult” — a recommended course of action based on the latest scientific literature. He coded that platform himself, by the way, since he knows nine programming languages (all learned from library books and polished with nerdy middle school friends, he said).
Before medicine, Hu envisioned a life as a computer scientist in Silicon Valley, trying to make people’s lives “more convenient,” he said. But it didn’t feel like enough. “When I see what people do in medicine, the focus is on: How do we make people more comfortable at a time when everything is going absolutely terribly?” His joy lies in connecting with people.
Hu has built a life bent toward fullness: textured Broadway soundtracks, skates slicing into glassy ice, rich compositions of classical music (he plays four instruments), homecooking, martial arts. People’s hearts, too, are complex. “There are so many different ways to interrogate this one organ,” Hu said. Curiosity keeps drawing him in.
— Isabella Cueto
