Di Wu

Dr. Di Wu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina (UNC) Gillings School of Global Public Health and holds a joint appointment in the UNC School of Dentistry. Her research focuses on developing statistical bioinformatics methods to analyze genomic, microbiome, and clinical data, with applications in cancer research, drug repurposing, and oral health. She has pioneered methods for gene set testing, longitudinal microbiome analysis, and integrative omics approaches.

• PhD in Bioinformatics, University of Melbourne (2011)
• MS in Biostatistics, Case Western Reserve University (2006)
• BS in Biotechnology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (1998)

Dr. Wu’s research interests include genomic data integration for causal inference, microbiome-driven disease prediction, and leveraging electronic health records (EHR) for public health informatics. Her recent projects emphasize causal mediation analysis and interpretable machine learning models to uncover relationships between genomic, microbiome, and metabolomic data. She has contributed to studies on early childhood caries, periodontitis, and the impact of clonal hematopoiesis on bone health.

Her work has been recognized through the 2011 Early Career Overseas Fellowship from Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council. She actively serves on dissertation committees for graduate students and has mentored researchers in biostatistics and dental informatics.

• Advising: Sarah Kay Youny Lee, Tanjit S. Taggar, Doug Wilson
• Service: Referee for Biometrics, Nucleic Acids Research, and other journals

Dr. Wu leads the Statistical Bioinformatics Group, collaborating on interdisciplinary projects in oral health, cancer genomics, and computational biology. Her lab develops open-source tools like ZOE 2.0 for early childhood oral health studies and LP-Micro for microbiome-based disease prediction.