Min Lu, PhD, is a research associate professor of biostatistics in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. She earned her doctoral degree in biostatistics from the University of Miami in 2018.
Dr. Lu’s research focuses on developing and integrating machine learning methods to identify causal relationships between treatments and outcomes and to support personalized treatment decisions. She has developed several statistical models, in collaboration with her advisor, Hemant Ishwaran, PhD, to estimate individual treatment effects and derive individualized treatment rules that accommodate continuous, binary, and survival outcomes.
Her work also includes statistical inference for random forest variable importance measures, which allow clinicians to link informative features to patient outcomes and treatment effects. Dr. Lu has applied these methodological frameworks to studies of ischemic cardiomyopathy and esophageal cancer in collaboration with Dr. Ishwaran and surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic, with the goal of advancing precision therapy through observational data to identify treatments predicted to maximize patient survival.