Xifeng Wu

Xifeng Wu is a Chinese-American cancer epidemiologist known for her cohort studies designed to discover the causes of cancer. She has been Dean of the School of Public Health of Zhejiang University since March 2019. She previously served as Director of the Center for Public Health and Translational Genomics and the Betty B. Marcus Chair in Cancer Prevention at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center until she was forced to resign in January 2019, as part of the Trump administration's push to counter Chinese influence in American research according to Bloomberg Businessweek.

Early life and education Wu was born into a family of Chinese medicine practitioners

In 1989, she was offered a fellowship by a French professor she had met at a conference and went to France to conduct postdoctoral research at the National Laboratory of Industrial Environment and Risk Analysis. In 1991, she moved to Houston to join her husband, and received a scholarship to study at the University of Texas School of Public Health.

She received her PhD in epidemiology 1994 from the University of Texas Health Science Center. Her dissertation was Genetic susceptibility, cigarette smoking, and wood dust exposure in lung cancer: Case control analyses, and her advisors were Margaret Spitz and George Delclos.

While still a graduate student, Wu joined the faculty of University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. In 2011, she was named Chair of Epidemiology at MD Anderson.

In March 2019, Wu was appointed Dean of the School of Public Health of her alma mater Zhejiang University.

Contributions Wu is known for designing cohort studies for the purpose of discovering the causes of cancer and potential prevention measures. that eating highly cooked meat can contribute to kidney cancer, that high-carbohydrate diets can contribute to lung cancer in non-smokers, and that chronic diseases such as high blood pressure or diabetes can also contribute to cancer. She has also researched and tested machine-learning models as methods of cancer prediction.