Mei Lu, PhD, Director over the Henry Ford Health System Data Coordinating Center (DCC), has more than 25 years of experience conducting and overseeing DCC research projects for a number of multi-center clinical trials and observational studies in a wide variety of disease areas including neurological disorders, cancer, clinical hepatitis, and liver-related autoimmune disease.

Dr. Lu is committed to applying comparative effectiveness research (CER) principles and methods to improve rigor in observational studies and to the use of automated, electronic health record-based, validated classification models for disease identification. She has expertise applying CER analytical approaches to “real-world data” to provide real-world evidence from observational studies as well as “pragmatic” trials to ensure that studies are cost-efficient and transparent.

Recently, she has focused on developing robust and validated statistical modeling to measure causal effects to study the interplay between (fixed and time-varying) factors on patients’ clinical trajectories and has expanded her knowledge and application of G-formula, a CER approach, which can be used to account for potentially biasing influences in real-world health care settings.