Dr. Yu received a Ph.D. in biostatistics from the University of Pittsburgh in 2000, and had postdoctoral training in statistical genetics at Stanford University. He joined NCI in 2005 as a tenure-track investigator, and was awarded scientific tenure by the NIH and appointed senior investigator in 2012. His research addresses a wide variety of statistically and computationally challenging problems that have arisen in design and analysis of modern high-dimensional genetic and molecular epidemiologic studies. Dr. Yu has developed an adaptive design framework for replicating findings from previous genetic studies; methods for population stratification adjustment in GWAS; and improved statistical procedures for detecting susceptibility gene, gene-environment interaction, and pathway effects. He has been the primary statistician in many large-scale epidemiologic studies, including GWAS of pancreatic and upper gastrointestinal cancers, as well as the Vitamin D Pooling Project of Rarer Cancers. In 2009, Dr. Yu received an NIH Merit Award for developing creative statistical methods for genetic epidemiologic studies

Statistical methods for genetic epidemiology studies; Tree-based models and applications in molecular epidemiology studies; MCMC algorithms and applications in genetic studies; Population genetics