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.

She is a member of the working group of fibWG2.4.2 on numerical modelling of fibre reinforced concrete since 2016. She serves as the member of the International Scientific Committee for the annual International Conference on Computational Methods since 2012. She is currently an executive member for SEMNI (Spanish Society for Numerical Methods in Engineering) and SEMTA (Spanish Society on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics).