Professor of Internal Medicine
Chair, Division of General Internal Medicine

Joining the medical school last fall, Tu brings both personal and professional experience in cross-cultural medicine. At her previous post at the University of Washington, she worked at a safety-net hospital and studied how to bring evidence-based medicine — particularly preventive medicine — to underserved populations.

It’s one thing to say colorectal cancer screening is good and quite another to implement the practice in clinical settings with high staff turnover and culturally diverse patient populations. In a recent study, Tu showed that certain organizational attributes are associated with success in implementing cancer screening at clinics serving Asian Pacific Islanders. She also chairs a CDC/NCI-funded network effort that surveyed Federally Qualified Health Centers for such attributes. Her work represents a key step in translational research — “How do we take interventions shown to work in controlled research settings and apply them to different practice settings?”

Tu says she is struck by the talent and passion on the MCV Campus. “It’s similar to the energy and enthusiasm at the startup company my son works at,” she says. “I’m thrilled that General Internal Medicine faculty play a big role in quality improvement efforts — and we have a huge footprint in
patient care.”