Dr Yu received a BS degree in Aeronautics from the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (BUAA), Beijing, China, in 1994, and MS and Ph.D. degrees in Aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA in 1997 and 2001, respectively. She moved to the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain in 2001 through a postdoc grant. From 2003-2007, she held a researcher position funded by the Spanish Program Ramón y Cajal. She got the tenured position in 2009 and won the full professor position in the area of Continuum Mechanics in 2019. Her research interest lies in the computational aspects of fracture and fatigue damage in quasi-brittle materials using finite element or meshfree methodologies.