Julia Xu

Assistant Professor of Medicine

Dr. Xu is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology/Oncology, Section of Benign Hematology, and the Vascular Medicine Institute at the University of Pittsburgh. She specializes in the care of adults with sickle cell disease (SCD). She received undergraduate degrees in biochemistry and Spanish and a Master of Science in chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her MD from Columbia University, and with a strong interest in red cell disorders and health disparities, studied G6PD deficiency in an HIV clinic in the Dominican Republic as a Doris Duke Clinical Research Fellow. She pursued a combined internal medicine-global health residency at Duke University and obtained a Master of Science in Global Health. There, she studied the trajectory and predictors of renal function decline in the Duke adult SCD cohort. She also studied thalassemia screening in vulnerable migrant populations at Siriraj Hospital in Bangkok, Thailand, funded by the Cooley’s Anemia Foundation and the NIH/Fogarty International Center. She completed her hematology fellowship at the NIH, where she led early-phase clinical trials of a novel drug therapy for patients with SCD. Dr. Xu is dedicated to improving anemia and related chronic complications in individuals living with SCD globally. Her clinical and translational research program is focused on evaluating new drug therapies and biomarkers for improving anemia in SCD.