Dr. Audrey Fu, Associate Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health Sciences and of Molecular Medicine and Genetics, our newest faculty addition, is a statistician who aims to connect statistical methods with real-world biomedical challenges.

A graduate of the University of Washington, she received a PhD in statistics with a concentration in statistical genetics. Dr. Fu comes from the University of Idaho, where she most recently was an Associate Professor of Statistics and of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology in the Department of Mathematics and Statistical Science. 

One factor that really stuck out to Dr. Fu about Wayne State’s School of Medicine was that it offers a dynamic environment for interdisciplinary collaboration. "I am excited to be at Wayne State and was really looking forward to working in a place where I could have close collaborators," Dr. Fu said. "At some places, research can often feel like a solo endeavor, especially in math and statistics. But here at Wayne State, I have the chance to work alongside experts in family medi-cine, genetics, and biomedical sciences, which makes my work more impactful and relevant."

At Wayne State, Dr. Fu’s research will focus on causal inference and deep learning, two fields that are changing how researchers deal with complex biomedical data. 

In causal inference, Dr. Fu is creating new methods to find causal relationships between genes without using traditional experiments, which can be expensive and take a long time. Her work with Mendelian randomization, which uses genetic data to mimic experi-mental conditions, could give key insights into the genetic causes of diseases like high blood pressure, providing a new way to look at complex biological interactions. 
In deep learning, Dr. Fu is building algorithms specifically for genomic data, aiming to map gene regulatory networks as hierarchies of multiple levels. Her method uses graph neural networks to examine these networks at differ-ent levels with an increasing resolution, from broad big-picture views down to single genes. She uses the analogy of zooming in on a map from a country’s borders to the streets of a city. 

Dr. Fu's move to Wayne State also highlights a growing trend in bio-medical research: collaboration. Unlike in theoretical mathematics or statistics, where assumptions can be made without real-world data, biomedical research needs people in different fields to work together to ensure that models and algorithms are correct. 

"Collaboration is essential in bio-medical sciences because the problems are very real and com-plex," Dr. Fu said. "What seems crucial from a statistical stand-point might not matter as much in a biomedical context, and vice versa. That’s why it’s so important to work closely with researchers from different disciplines."