Wenyu Liu

Wenyu joined the Translational Epidemiology Unit (TEU) in the Nuffield Department of Population Health (NDPH) in June 2023. Her main research interests include establishing causes of common chronic diseases, quantifying the impact of their risk factors and investigating the performance of polygenic risk scores and their interaction with other risk factors based on large-scale prospective cohort data (e.g. UK Biobank). She is also interested in developing statistical methodology and deriving adjusted risk prediction models for population of interest.

Before joining TEU NDPH, Wenyu was a senior statistician at Cancer Research UK Clinical Trial Unit at the University of Birmingham, where she was involved in the design and analysis of different late phase (phase II/III) national/international cancer trials, including trials with multi-arm multi-stage design which simultaneously compares several experimental treatments with a control group and allows early dropping of inferior treatment(s) and adding additional experimental treatment(s) during the course of the trial.

Prior to that, she completed a PhD in statistics in the School of Mathematical Sciences at Queen Mary, University of London, where she investigated the performance of adaptive trial designs that combined response-adaptive randomisation with group sequential analyses. Unlike conventional equal or fixed ratio allocation, the probability of treatment allocation in such trial design is based on the observed cumulative responses. Overall, the designs control the type I error rate well and assign more patients to the more promising treatment without adversely affecting the power.