Dr Dongfeng Wu

Dr Dongfeng Wu

Editor-in-Chief: Dr. Dongfeng Wu

Dr. Wu is an Associate Professor at the Department of Bioinformatics and Biostatistics, University of Louisville, where she serves as Director of the MS Biostatistics/Decision Science Program. During her PhD dissertation research in statistics at University of California, Santa Barbara, she worked on wavelet regression, to find the appropriate threshold values in the wavelets domain, so that noises can be removed and true signal can be retrieved. As a research associate at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, she started to work on cancer screening, and developed probability models to estimate key parameters in periodic screening exams, such as screening sensitivity, sojourn time in preclinical state, transition probability from the disease-free state to the preclinical state. During her stay at Mississippi State University as an assistant professor, Dr. Wu continued her research in cancer screening, and derived the probability distribution of the lead time for the whole diseased cohort, including screen-detected cases and interval-cases, which were funded by the National Cancer Institute. 

Dr. Wu has a broad interest in the field of statistics. She has worked on several topics besides cancer screening, including design of clinical trials, wavelet regression, Bayesian inferences, variance components. Dr. Wu's current research at the University of Louisville is focused on applying her probability modeling and statistical methods to different kinds of screening data, such as breast cancer, colon cancer and lung cancer. She has developed a new probability model to project the benefits of periodic screening into the future, by classifying all participants in the programs into four categories: true-early-detection, no-early-detection, over-diagnosis, and not-so-necessary. She is working on dynamically scheduling future exam based on individual’s history using  a probability model.

Since 2000, Dr. Wu has been an active member of the American Statistical Association, and the International Biometric Society. She has publications in Biometrics, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation, Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods, Journal of the Transportation Research Forum, Wood Science and Technology, Cancer Causes and Control, Cancer Epidemiology and Lung Cancer. She has served as a reviewer and a member of the editorial advisory boards of multiple journals.