Kana Wu, MD PhD MPH

Senior Research Scientist, Dept. of Nutrit., Harvard T. H. Chan Schl. of Public Health

working group member for Intl. Agency for Research on Cancer Monographs on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans, “Red Meat and Processed Meat”

Kana Wu, MD PhD MPH is a Senior Research Scientist at the Department of Nutrition of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.  She holds an MD from the Medical School in Hanover, Germany as well as an MPH and PhD in Chronic Disease Epidemiology from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.  For the past 16 years she has been a member of an ongoing research team at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School and Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

Dr. Wu’s work as a researcher in three large long-running U.S. based cohorts, the Nurses’ Health Studies I and II, and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, has focused on the relationships between lifestyle and diet and cancers, particularly colorectal and prostate cancers.  She has in this work examined numerous different types of exposures, such as meat mutagens, and of indicators of dietary and lifestyle patterns, such as plasma biomarkers and food frequency questionnaire data.  More recently, her work has focused on examining whether associations between risk factors and cancers (a) are modified by genetic susceptibility, (b) differ by molecular subtypes of cancer, or (c) differ over the course of a lifetime.

Dr. Wu is also a collaborator of two international consortia, the “Pooling Project of Prospective Studies of Diet and Cancer Consortium” and the “Genetics and Epidemiology of Colorectal Cancer Consortium (GECCO)”.  She was also a member of the working group for the IARC Monographs on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans, Volume 114: “Red Meat and Processed Meat”.   She is the author or co-author of 113 articles in peer-reviewed journals.