Dr. Shu is the associate director for Biostatistics at the Clinical Futures, a CHOP Research Institute Center of Emphasis, and a Biostatistics faculty member at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. She is also an assistant professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics, and an investigator in the Center for Pharmacoepidemiology Research and Training, in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Shu is interested in developing and applying suitable statistical methods to assess comparative safety and effectiveness of drugs and other medical products with real-world data — including electronic health records and administrative claims data — which may have complex structures that complicate statistical analysis.

Her research areas include causal inference, measurement error, pharmacoepidemiology, and privacy-protecting methods. To address concerns about misspecification of the treatment decision process using a single propensity score model, Dr. Shu and her colleagues have developed a robust method that allows for simultaneously using a set of propensity score models. The resulting estimators of causal effect measures achieve statistical consistency when the set of propensity score models contains a correct one. They also have developed a one-step method to allow data partners to share only summary-level risk set tables to estimate overall and site-specific hazard ratios in distributed data network studies. This method has been implemented as part of the routine querying tools in Sentinel, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's national medical product safety surveillance system. To correct for outcome misclassification, a common data quality issue, they derived a closed-form, bias-corrected estimator of causal relative risk as well as an efficient method using validation data.

Dr. Shu is also passionate about software development. She and her colleagues have written three packages that are publicly available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network and an online calculator for ROC study sample size planning with precision and assurance.

PhD, University of Waterloo (Statistics), 2018

MSc, University of Western Ontario (Statistics with specialization in Biostatistics), 2014

BSc, South China University of Technology (Mathematics and Applied Mathematics), 2013

Assistant Professor of Biostatistics

Associate Director for Biostatistics, Clinical Futures

Statistical Society of Canada, 2015-

American Statistical Association, 2019-

International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology, 2019-

International Chinese Statistical Association, 2021-