In 2015, I started my bachelors in Medicine. I was quickly inspired by how research shapes clinical practice. Therefore, during my bachelors, I started spending extra hours on research at the Clinical Epidemiology Department of the LUMC, to investigate the effectiveness of cardiorenal therapies. After my bachelors, I was supported in my research aspiration with a personal LUMC MD/PhD-scholarship (€154.000, top 1% students), allowing me to pursue a PhD before my clinical rotations. After obtaining my PhD cum laude (2021), I received the Rubicon grant from NWO/ZonMw to expand my research with further postdoctoral training at the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School (2021-2023). Currently, with support of a VENI grant I have returned to LUMC as a senior researcher, where I am also finishing my masters in Medicine to become MD.
My main research line focuses on answering pressing clinical questions in nephrology and cardiology by combining innovative causal methods and large-scale healthcare data. The main challenge in my research is to draw correct causal conclusions, since association is not causation. For instance, I showed that the majority of studies on optimal dialysis timing used heavily flawed methods leading to incorrect conclusions (Fu et al. BMJ 2021), with potential detrimental consequences for patient care. To overcome these flaws, I pioneered the use of cutting-edge methods such as target trial emulation (Fu JASN 2023) and the clone-censor-weight method in the field of nephrology (Fu JASN 2021). This allowed me to obtain more reliable answers to important clinical questions on the effectiveness and safety of treatments. Consequently, my research has directly impacted patient care by informing several international clinical practice guidelines and position statements (see this overview).
Secondly, with support of a Junior Kolff Grant from the Dutch Kidney Foundation, I've done research into the diagnosis and epidemiology of chronic kidney disease. In a number of joint research projects with Andrew Levey and Josef Coresh, we have investigated if cystatin C is a better filtration marker to estimate kidney function and to predict cardiovascular and kidney outcomes. Moreover, we were interested in the accuracy of the equations that are used to estimate kidney function in older populations and in European - predominantly white - populations. The question on race was fueled by the newest CKD-EPI equation dropping the race variable from its equation, sparking a discussion whether the resulting equation (developed in the US) would be suitable in Europe as well.
Backed by a VENI grant, I am currently extending my research to personalized medicine, by developing causal prediction models. It's an exciting field: theory on estimating treatment benefits for individual patients is in its infancy but rapidly developing. This has enormous potential to improve personalized medicine and lower healthcare costs by prescribing expensive medications only to those who will benefit, and thereby also minimizing side-effects.
First and foremost, I support and train my team to help them use complex epidemiological methods to answer important clinical questions. I dedicate much of my time to one-on-one training to teach them the intricacies of the methods, and I hope to also share my enthusiasm about research with them. At the same time, I also hope to inspire a much larger group and spark discussions by sharing my insights and work on LinkedIn and X.
I have enjoyed to give invited lectures to diverse audiences around the world (an overview here), including the Japanese Society of Nephrology, Aarhus University, UCL and Harvard. Writing educational articles is another way in which I try to make complex causal methods accessible to clinicians (e.g. Fu JASN 2023 or Fu et al. BMJ 2021). Also, I feel honored that I can help to improve the quality of research by serving as epidemiology editor for Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation, which invited me to be the youngest editor in the history of the journal. Moreover, I peer review for various journals (e.g. JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, JACC, European Heart Journal, Kidney International, Nature Communications), and until 2023 I served as editorial fellow at Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
I am grateful for the recognition for my research with various awards and grants. In 2024, the European Renal Association (ERA) council awarded me with the title Distinguished Fellow of the ERA (FERA) for my "exceptional contributions to the ERA community and the outstanding work in clinical and research fields related to nephrology". I am also honoured to have received the Stanley Shaldon Award (2023) from the ERA “for the impact of his work on research and education in nephrology”. It is the highest European distinction in nephrology for investigators under 40, and at 26 years I am the youngest award winner to date. Other awards include "Best Reviewer of the Year" from JASN (2024), “Best PhD Thesis in Nephrology” by the NFN/Nierstichting (2022), Elsevier Weekblad’s “30 under 30” list (2022), “Best epidemiology article by a junior researcher” by the Dutch Epidemiology Society (2022; for the article Fu et al. BMJ 2021) and various congress awards as listed here.
I am fortunate to have been continuously funded with various grants throughout my research career (total €874,386):