Shufa Du

Shufa Du, MD, PhD is a Professor in the Department of Nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. His research focuses on nutritional epidemiology, examining how education, income, genetics, and environmental factors influence dietary behaviors, physical activity, and health outcomes such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and obesity. Since 1996, he has directed the China Health and Nutrition Survey, a major international cohort study, and mentors students through the NIH Fogarty training project.

Dr. Du holds a MD (1987), MS in Biostatistics (1990), PhD in Epidemiology (1996) from Tongji Medical University, and a postdoc in Nutritional Epidemiology from UNC-Chapel Hill. He collaborates extensively with China’s CDC to support global fieldwork internships for students.

His research spans nutritional patterns, cardiometabolic health, and public health policy, with notable contributions to understanding food retail impacts, diabetes management, and sodium intake trends in China. Dr. Du’s work bridges epidemiological methods with real-world health interventions.

He advises NIH-funded projects and oversees training programs focused on nutrition-related non-communicable diseases prevention in China. His lab’s activities emphasize translational research and global health equity.