Yanxun Xu

YANXUN XU is an associate professor of applied mathematics and statistics at the Whiting School of Engineering and an adjunct associate professor in the Division of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She is known for developing Bayesian statistical theory and methodology for complex, heterogeneous, and large-scale datasets, with applications in a broad range of fields, such as electronic medical record data, cancer genomics, clinical trials, and network data. By developing novel statistical methods and new computational algorithms with open-source software, her work has led to a better understanding of heterogeneity in treatment effects across patient subpopulations in clinical trials, advanced personalized treatment response from electronic medical record data to facilitate precision medicine and shed light on the effects of antiretroviral drugs on mental health and central nervous systems in HIV patients.

Xu’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Johns Hopkins Center for AIDS Research, France’s Institut National du Cancer, and various industries (e.g., AstraZeneca, Booz Allen Hamilton). She has published more than 80 articles in academic journals and co-authored three book chapters. She is the recipient of a 2016 Mitchell Prize from the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA), JHU’s Center for AIDS Research Faculty Development Award, and Hopkins in Health Discovery Program Award.