Xinghua Lu

Dr. Xinghua Lu is a biomedical informatics researcher at the Department of Biomedical Informatics of the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Lu has broad research experience spanning clinical patient care, basic biomedical sciences, systems biology, big data and personalized medicine. His current research covers a broad range of biomedical informatics, including systems biology modeling of cellular signal transduction pathways, semantic modeling of biomedical literatures, and translational bioinformatics. He is a co-director of the Center for Translational Bioinformatics and the Director of the Cancer Pathway Program of the Center for the Causal Discovery (funded by the Centers of Research Excellence in Big Data to Knowledge initiative of the NIH of the US). His research team has won multiple awards in international research challenges, such as the DREAM challenge and the SBV challenge. One direction of his current research concentrates on personalized medicine in big data setting, and he directs a team of collaborators to develop statistical methods for performing patient-specific inference for identifying drivers of each individual patient’s tumor through mining big data from The Cancer Genome Atlas and the International Cancer Genome Consortium. The capability of inferring driver genomic alteration in individual patients plays a fundamental role in the era of personalized precision cancer care.