Pingsheng Wu, PhD

Pingsheng Wu, PhD, is a Research Professor of Medicine in the Division of Allergy, Pulmonary, and Critical Care Medicine within the Department of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She is an epidemiologist with experience in large healthcare claims databases and electronic medical records.

Dr. Wu’s long-term career goal is to understand disease inception and progression and thus develop strategies for disease primary prevention. Much of her primary research interest focuses on pulmonary diseases related early life modifiable environmental risk factor prevention. She is particularly interested in understanding the causal relationship between early respiratory viral infection and later asthma development, as well as the acute and long-term public health benefits of viral prevention.

Her work has advanced our understanding of the clinical significance of respiratory viral infections in the development of asthma, providing compelling evidence that early infant respiratory viral infections cause asthma. Dr. Wu is additionally interested in the development of statistical methods that suit for observational studies using such databases.

Besides research, Dr. Wu is passionate in training and mentoring the fellows and graduate students who are interested in pursuing a career of public health and epidemiology.