Education

• Postdoc, Harvard University, 2015
• PhD, Statistical Bioinformatics, University of Melbourne, VIC, Australia, 2011
• MS, Biostatistics, Case Western Reserve University, 2006
• BS, Biotechnology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, 1998

Biosketch

Di Wu is a biostatistician working in the bioinformatics field. She has developed novel statistical bioinformatics methods to handle biomedical and genomics data. She also has developed gene set testing methods with high citations, in the empirical Bayesian framework, to take care of small complex design and genewise correlation structure.

Dr. Wu has applied data integration strategy to identify the potential cell of origin for different breast cancer subtypes in silicon (at WEHI). Her recent projects have focused on genomic data based drug repurposing (at Harvard). She is now working on novel mediator analysis-based data integration tools to infer the likely causal relation across multiple levels of genomic, microbiome and metabolites (at UNC).

Her new project has more microbiome and Electrical Medical Records components since the announcement of her joint position in the UNC School of Dentistry the Department of Biostatistics and the Carolina Health Informatics Program in 2015.

Research Interests

Biostatistics, cancer, oral biology, bioinformatics, gene expression, genomics, microbiome, health informatics, data integration, stem cell, autoimmune disease

Research Summary

Wu’s team is developing novel statistical bioinformatics tools and applies them in biomedical research to help understanding the precision medicine for cancer (e.g., breast cancer and lung cancer) subtypes, the disease associated integrative pathways across multiple genomic regulatory levels, and the potential of drug repurposing mechanisms. Their recent focus includes pathway analysis, microbiome data analysis, data integration and EMR. Their application fields include cancer, stem cell, autoimmune disease and oral biology.

Availability to Mentor

Undergraduate/college student, graduate student, undergraduate DDS or DH student, and junior faculty member