Ginling College
Hu was born in 1910 to a farm family in a Chinese village near the city of Xuzhou in Jiangsu province. She received her B.Sc. in Biology from Ginling College (now part of Nanjing Normal University) and M.Sc. in Biology from Lingnan University (now part of Sun Yat-sen University). In 1946 Hu traveled to the United States to pursue a Ph.D. in Botany at Radcliffe College. Her supervisor was Elmer Drew Merrill. In 1949 she became the second Chinese woman to receive a doctoral degree in botany from Harvard University, the first being Luetta Hsiu-Ying Chen (陈秀英, 1910-1949), who received her Ph.D. degree in 1942.