Haitao Chu was honored by the Emory University Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics with the 2024 Michael H. Kutner Alumni Award for Distinguished Service to the Discipline at the Eastern North American Region of the Biometric Society annual meeting in March. Rob Krafty, Rollins Chair of the department of biostatistics and bioinformatics at the Emory Rollins School of Public Health, presented Chu with an engraved plaque.
Chu earned his MD in 1995 in preventive medicine from Sichuan University. He then studied in a master’s degree program in epidemiology at Peking University from 1995 to 1998. In 1998, he was admitted to the doctoral program in biostatistics at Emory, where he earned his master’s in 2002 and PhD in 2003. His dissertation, titled “Estimating Vaccine Efficacy in the Presence of Correlated Data and Missing Data,” was conducted under the mentorship of Elizabeth (Betz) Halloran.
In 2003, Chu joined Johns Hopkins University as a research assistant professor in the department of epidemiology. Chu transitioned to The University of North Carolina Lineberger Cancer Center in 2007 as a research-track associate professor and later served as the codirector of the biostatistics core for the UNC Center for AIDS Research. In 2010, Chu matriculated to the University of Minnesota Twin Cities Division of Biostatistics and Health Data Science as a tenure-track associate professor, earning tenure in 2013 and promotion to full professor in 2017. In 2021, he served as the director of the Biostatistical Design and Analysis Center at the UMN Clinical and Translational Science Institute. Throughout his tenure at UMN, Chu actively mentored doctoral and master’s students interested in comparative effectiveness and research synthesis methods, directing or codirecting 15 doctoral dissertations. In 2022, Chu joined Pfizer as a senior director of biostatistics in the statistical research and data science center.
Chu’s academic accomplishments are extensive, with 270 refereed publications, including more than 80 methodological papers in top statistical journals and more than 100 methodological publications in nonstatistical journals. Among these, more than 80 publications are either first-authored or student first-authored, reflecting his dedication to mentorship and research. With an H-index of 60 and more than 20,000 Google Scholar citations, his work exemplifies a balance between methodological innovation and applied collaboration.
Chu was elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2016. He is an elected member of the Society of Research Synthesis Methodology, recognizing his significant methodological research contributions. He has served as the principal investigator on multiple National Institutes of Health–funded grants, including one R01, three R03, and three R21 grants. Additionally, he has contributed to the field as an associate editor for several major journals, including the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the American Journal of Epidemiology, and Statistics in Medicine.
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