Newswise — HOUSTON – (May 4, 2017) – Hulin Wu, Ph.D., has been selected as the new chair of the Department of Biostatistics at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) School of Public Health. Wu has been serving as the associate chair of the department since he joined UTHealth School of Public Health as a professor in 2015. He holds a joint appointment as a professor at UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics.

“Dr. Wu has an established research program on high dimensional and heterogeneous data, and he has a long-standing track record of multicenter studies of viral infection,” said Eric Boerwinkle, Ph.D., dean of UTHealth School of Public Health, M. David Low Chair in Public Health and Kozmetsky Family Chair in Human Genetics. “Over the course of this important recruitment for the school, I had a number of conversations with him about his vision for biostatistics and data sciences in modern population health sciences, and I am pleased with his broad commitment to the research, teaching and service mission of the school.”

Wu came to the School of Public Health from University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, where he founded the school’s Division of Biomedical Modeling and Informatics and the Center for Integrative Bioinformatics and Experimental Mathematics. His specialized statistical methods, mathematical models and computing software integrate sophisticated big data to reveal how disease originates and develops and the effects of medical treatments on the future health of patients.

Wu helped uncover how the human immune system responds to HIV and influenza viruses and has designed, coordinated and analyzed data from more than 15 National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded AIDS clinical trials.

Wu is a passionate proponent of team science and collaboration research. He collaborates with biostatistics colleagues within UTHealth and other institutions to advance research in the Texas Medical Center.

“This is a great opportunity for me to work with our school leaders, our department faculty members and our collaborators from other departments and other UTHealth schools to relaunch the Department of Biostatistics in the big data era,” said Wu. “This is an exciting time for statisticians and data scientists to make significant contributions to improve the health of the people of Texas, the nation and the world. The cutting-edge technologies now could rapidly collect and produce tons of data waiting for people to analyze, integrate and interpret. One of our major goals is to prepare ourselves and next generations of statisticians and data scientists to advance data analytic and quantitative approaches to extract useful information from large volumes of data to support health science research.”

Wu earned an M.S. and Ph.D. in statistics from Florida State University and a B.S. and M.S. in engineering from National University of Defense Technology in China.

His top research interests include biomedical big data analytics; statistical methods and theories for differential equation models; high-dimension data analysis and inference; computational systems biology and bioinformatics; clinical trials; longitudinal data; and other statistical methodologies.

- Written by Shannon Neufeld and Anissa Anderson Orr