Dr. Yu is a neurogeneticist at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He obtained his A.B. in biochemistry at Harvard College and his MD/PhD program at UCSF with a focus on neuroscience. After completing neurology residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, he joined the faculty at Boston Children’s Hospital, where he is a Staff Physician in the Division of Genetics, Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute. His research group works at the intersection of human genetics, neurobiology, and genomic medicine.

Research interests include:

Autism genetics and neurobiology: Dr. Yu’s team applies exome and genome sequencing to study the genetic architecture of autism spectrum disorder. His work has implicated novel neurobiological pathways in autism pathogenesis including serotonergic development, axon guidance and nitric oxide signaling.

Genomic medicine: Dr. Yu and his colleagues are developing methods and models for applying genomics to the care of patients, piloting genome sequencing as a replacement for newborn screening and deploying rapid turnaround genome sequencing in the NICU.

Individualized therapeutics: Dr. Yu’s team is piloting the use of antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) to develop individualized medicines for children with severe, orphan neurologic diseases, employing regulatory and clinical innovations to shorten the turnaround time between molecular recognition and therapeutic intervention.