RESEARCH INTERESTS
The Yu lab operates at the intersection of genomics, data science and cancer biology. Our mission is to understand how cancer cells adapt to their microenvironment to promote treatment resistance, relapse and metastasis. We leverage cutting-edge single-cell and spatial omics, advanced statistical modeling, machine learning, and collaborative functional studies to uncover the molecular and cellular mechanisms of cancer cell plasticity and identify novel therapeutic targets and strategies. By developing innovative computational methodologies and integrating large-scale multimodal biomedical data, we investigate:
- Transcriptional and epigenetic regulation
- Cell-cell communication within the tumor microenvironment
- The impact of inflammation on the plasticity of cancer cells
EDUCATION & TRAINING
- PhD in Statistics, Chonnam National University, South Korea
- MS in Computational Mathematics, University of Science and Technology of China, China
- BS in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, Chongqing University, China
- Postdoc, Department of Statistics, Seoul National University, South Korea
- Postdoc, Division of Oncology, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, USA
MEMBERSHIPS
- American Association for Cancer Research (AACR)
AWARDS & HONORS
- American Cancer Society Institutional Research Pilot Grant
- Children's Hospital of Philadelphia Klaus Hummeler Publication Award
- South Korea BK21 Scholarship
- China National Scholarship
PUBLICATIONS
Full List: Google Scholar, NCBI Bibliography.
- J. H. Sussman*, D. A. Oldridge*, W. Yu*, et al. A longitudinal single-cell and spatial multiomic atlas of pediatric high-grade glioma, Cell Reports Medicine (2026).
- W. Yu*, R. Biyik-Sit*, Y. Uzun*, C.H. Chen*, A. Thadi, et al. Longitudinal single-cell multiomic atlas of high-risk neuroblastoma reveals chemotherapy-induced tumor microenvironment rewiring, Nature Genetics (2025).
- A.U. Zezulin, D. Ye, E. Howell, D. Yen, E. Bresciani, J. Diemer, J. Ren, …, W. Yu#, N. A. Speck#. RUNX1 is required in granulocyte-monocyte progenitors to attenuate inflammatory cytokine production by neutrophils, Genes & Development (2023).
- C. Chen*, W. Yu*, F. Alikarami*, Q. Qiu, et al. Single-cell multiomics reveals increased plasticity, resistant populations, and stem-cell–like blasts in KMT2A-rearranged leukemia, Blood (2022).
- W. Yu, Y. Uzun, Q. Zhu, C. Chen, K. Tan. scATAC-pro: a comprehensive workbench for single-cell chromatin accessibility sequencing data, Genome Biology (2020).
- W. Yu, B. He, K. Tan. Identifying topologically associating domains and subdomains by Gaussian Mixture model And Proportion test, Nature Communications (2017).