Cathy H. Wu

Cathy H. Wu is the Edward G. Jefferson Chair and professor and director of the Center for Bioinformatics & Computational Biology (CBCB) at the University of Delaware. She is also the director of the Protein Information Resource (PIR) and the North east Bioinformatics Collaborative Steering Committee, and the adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Medical Center.
Early life and education.
Wu is the middle child of the five daughters and a son in her family. She responded with top marks at National Taiwan University and showed a flair for science, logic, and computations. Her father was an aeronautics engineer. She graduated with a BS in Plant Pathology at the National Taiwan University in 1978, a MS in Plant Pathology at Purdue University in 1982 and followed with a PhD in the same university in 1984. She then received a Postdoc degree in Molecular Biology at the Michigan State University in 1986 and a MS in Computer Science at the University of Texas (UT) at Tyler in 1989.
Career.
In 1989, Wu completed her thesis on the use of artificial neural networks to classify proteins, and graduated. Her thesis advisor, George M. Witson III, chairman of the Computer Science Department at UT hired her after she graduated in 1989. She then taught computer science as an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science in UT Tyler from 1989 to 1994. She also worked as an assistant professor from 1990 to 1994, associate professor from 1994 to 1998, and professor from 1998 to 1999 of the Biomathematics University of Texas Health Center at Tyler. She carried out research at the UT Tyler's health sciences college under epidemiology and biomathematics professor Jerry McClarty. She has conducted bioinformatics research from 1990 and developed several protein classification systems and databases. She also managed large software and database projects leading bioinformatics effort of the Protein Information Resource (PIR) from 1999, and became the PIR Director and the vice president of the National Biomedical Research Foundation, Washington, D.C. from 2001 to 2002. From 2001 until present, she is the professor of the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and the Director of PIR Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC). She is also currently the professor at the Department of Oncology and the member of the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, GUMC from 2002. In 2009, Wu was accepted as the Edward G. Jefferson Chair of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Delaware (UD).