On August 1st we welcomed a new Associate Professor in Biostatistics, Audrey Fu.

Dr. Fu earned her PhD in Statistics with a concentration in Statistical Genetics from the University of Washington. She completed postdoctoral training in several genetics laboratories before joining the University of Idaho as an Assistant Professor of Statistics and Bioinformatics and Computational Biology in the Department of Mathematics and Statistical Science. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2021.

Dr. Fu specializes in developing statistical methods and algorithms to advance the understanding of diverse and high-dimensional data in genomics and other biomedical fields. Her recent research includes the development of various statistical models and machine learning algorithms for causal network inference based on Mendelian randomization, deep learning techniques for analyzing single-cell RNA-sequencing data, methods for profiling gene regulation types of gene variants, and approaches for identifying disease-relevant cell types through the integration of single-cell gene expression data with summary statistics from genome-wide association studies.

Dr. Fu’s research group is dedicated to open science and actively distributes open-source software packages in R and Python via popular platforms such as GitHub and the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). She looks forward to collaborating on study design, statistical modeling, data analysis, and other research endeavors.