Dr. Xu’s primary research interest is in the field of genetic epidemiology of complex traits in humans. Dr. Xu has been working on several gene-mapping projects, including two large HSPH-China collaborative studies on essential hypertension and asthma. A number of QTLs for blood pressure and asthma related phenotypes have been identified through these studies. Currently Dr. Xu is working on fine-mapping of asthma susceptibility genes in the chromosomal regions identified previously.
Dr. Xu has also been interest in developing novel statistical methods and tools in genetic analysis, and collaborates closely with his colleagues in the Department of Biostatistics. In collaboration with Dr LJ Wei, he proposed a “unified Haseman-Elston” method for sibpair linkage analysis which had been shown to be uniformly more powerful than other H-E methods. Dr. Xu has also ccollaborated closely with Dr. Nan Laird in developing FBAT, a unified approach for testing genetic association in arbitary pedigrees.
In addition, Dr. Xu is also interested in bioinformatics, especially in the computation analysis of genomic sequences.