UHCOP Welcomes Statistitican Xi Lu to Pharmaceutical Health Outcomes and Policy Faculty

September 13 — The University of Houston College of Pharmacy recently welcomed Xi (Lucy) Lu, Ph.D., as an assistant professor in the college’s Department of Pharmaceutical Health Outcomes and Policy.

Lu’s research focus is on statistical machine learning for high/ultra-high dimensional data, robust Bayesian variable selection for cancer genomics data, and robust methods in mixed effects model for longitudinal studies, robust variable selection in survival analysis, and robust regularized variable selection and its applications for multi-omics data analysis.

Lu earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and applied mathematics at East China Normal University in Shanghai, China, a master's degree in statistics from Columbia University, and recently completed her Ph.D. in statistics from Kansas State University (KSU). Her doctoral dissertation was on "Robust Bayesian methods to sparse high-dimensional regression."

During her time at KSU, Lu served as a graduate teaching assistant whose duties included teaching in undergraduate statistics courses, designing and leading lecture and review discussions for more than 80 students, and preparing a range of course materials, from lectures to homework and exams. She also completed a biostatistician internship with the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, performing work on clinical trial data and other projects.

She presented "Robust integration of multi-omics data for Gene-Environment Interactions" at the 2019 annual conference of the International Chinese Statistical Association and "Identification of Gene-Environment interactions using a marginal robust Bayesian method" at the American Statistical Association’s Joint Statistical Meetings in 2020.

Lu has authored or coauthored papers in such journals as Frontiers of Genetics, Bio Tech and Genetic Epidemiology, and served as reviewer for BMC Genomics.