After a childhood interest in
marine biology, Yu was inspired by a high school astrophysics class to think of the universe itself as being deep and mysterious in the same way as the ocean. She majored in physics at the
University of Chicago, graduating in 2007. She completed her Ph.D. in 2013 at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison, with the last two years of her doctoral study involving research as a graduate student fellow at
Fermilab. Her dissertation,
The Top Quark as a Window to Beyond the Standard Model Physics, was supervised by
Vernon Barger. After postdoctoral research at the
C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics of
Stony Brook University, and as a theory fellow at
CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, she took a faculty position as assistant professor of physics at the University of Oregon (on leave for a year while she finished her work at CERN). In 2022 she was promoted to associate professor. Her work at the University of Oregon has included cofounding an interdisciplinary student research program in science and comics, with comics studies faculty member Kate Kelp-Stebbins. ==Recognition==