Samuel Wu, Ph.D.

Professor of Biostatistics

College of Public Health & Health Professions

2023 Awardee

Samuel Wu’s research interests are in adaptive design of clinical trials, simultaneous statistical inference and data privacy technologies.

Wu and colleague Shigang Chen, a UF professor of computer and information science and engineering, invented a patented technology for medical data collection and analysis that shields data from users, but allows for standard statistical analysis to still be performed with nearly the same results for masked data as for the original data.

Wu is the director of the Research Design and Data Coordinating Center in UF’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute, which helps researchers across campus by providing innovative research design, high-quality data management, state-of-the-art data analysis and advanced data privacy technologies.

Since 2018, Wu and the center team have collaborated with UF faculty to obtain 10 NIH awards totaling more than $62 million for studies designed to delay dementia, improve self-management or comorbidities in persons living with HIV, develop pain prevention interventions, and more.

Wu has been continuously funded since 2000 and he currently serves as the principal investigator on two National Institutes of Health-funded grants focused on data privacy technologies. He has more than 200 publications in peer-reviewed journals and proceedings, in which he and his co-authors regularly report significant health research findings, methods for more efficient clinical trial design and analysis, and ways to ensure more technologically secure health data collection and sharing.

Wu’s service to the profession includes acting as co-chair of the organizing committee for the 2022 ICSA Applied Statistical Symposium, held in Gainesville. In this role, he was responsible for setting up all nine conference committees, seeking proposals and finalizing the scientific program, among other activities. More than 400 participants from eight countries attended the conference on the theme of “Statistical Innovations in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science.” He has also served as the associate editor for the journal Statistics in Biosciences, and as a member of five Special Emphasis Panels for the NIH and Department of Defense.

He received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in probability and statistics from Peking University and Nankai University, respectively, and a Ph.D. in statistics from Cornell University.