Rate My Professor April Shu

April Shu, PhD, also known as Chang Shu, is an Assistant Professor of Population and Public Health Sciences in the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. She holds appointments in the Center for Genetic Epidemiology, the Department of Pediatrics, and the Quantitative and Computational Biology program. Dr. Shu earned her Ph.D. in Mental Health, focusing on psychiatric genetics and epigenetics, from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2018, mentored by Drs. Brion Maher and Dani Fallin, with concurrent training in statistical genetics and machine learning under Dr. Hongkai Ji and a Master's degree in Biostatistics. She previously received a Master's degree in Epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health, mentored by Drs. Edward Giovannucci and Benjamin Le Cook, and a Bachelor's degree in Chemistry and Biochemistry from Tsinghua University in Beijing. Prior to USC, she completed postdoctoral training at Yale University with Dr. Ke Xu and served as an Associate Research Scientist in the laboratories of Drs. Wendy Chung and Yufeng Shen.

Dr. Shu specializes in psychiatric genetics and epidemiology. Her work focuses on autism genetics, substance use epigenetics, single-cell transcriptomics, and the use of advanced statistical and machine learning techniques to uncover novel genetic and epigenetic factors in mental and behavioral disorders. She collaborates with Children’s Hospital Los Angeles on translational research to improve clinical patient care. Notable awards include the Early Career Investigators Award from the College on Problems of Drug Dependence in 2020, first place in the DREAM Challenge for single-cell transcriptome prediction in 2018, induction into the Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society in 2018, and the Lucy Shum Memorial Scholarship for excellence in public health research from Johns Hopkins in 2016. Key publications encompass “Integrating de novo and inherited variants in 42,607 autism cases identifies mutations in new moderate-risk genes” (Nature Genetics, 2022), “Return of genetic research results in 21,532 individuals with autism” (Genetics in Medicine, 2024), “Microglial States Are Susceptible to Senescence and Cholesterol Dysregulation in Alzheimer’s Disease” (Aging Cell, 2025), “Benchmarking machine learning missing data imputation methods in large-scale mental health survey databases” (Artificial Intelligence in Health, 2024), and “A review of single-cell transcriptomics and epigenomics studies in maternal and child health” (Epigenomics, 2024).