Interests

Information retrieval, extraction, natural language processing, summarization, human-computer interaction, with a focus on biomedical applications.

Biography

Ph.D. Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University, New York; MA and MPh, Physiology and Cellular Biophysics, Columbia University, New York; MS, Physiology, Beijing University, China; BS, Biomedical Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China

Research

Professor Yu's research interests are in the areas of information retrieval, extraction, natural language processing, summarization, human-computer interaction, with a focus on biomedical applications. She has led the development of many systems, including the biomedical question answering system AskHERMES (http://www.askhermes.org), the adverse drug event pharmacovigilance system (http://www.ADErepository.org), the innovative biomedical figure search system (http://figuresearch.askhermes.org), and the NoteAid systems that help patients comprehend electronic medical records (http://ClinicalNotesAid.org).

Awards & Activities

Professor Yu has served as co-Chair in the biomedical natural language processing sections of the Pacific Symposium of Biocomputing and IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics & Biomedicine. She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics, and is the PI of several National Institutes of Health funded projects. She was a recipient of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) pre-doctoral training grant to Columbia University and is one of the six “star trainees” selected by NLM on its celebration of 175th anniversary. Her first paper in biomedical informatics was nominated as one of the best papers in the American Medical Informatics Association Fall Symposium of 1999. Her work is included as best paper in IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics 2011, described in “Translational Bioinformatics 2012 Year in Review” by Russ Altman, and featured in Science, Nature, BioInform, the Pulitzer-winning Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the Milwaukee Public Radio.