She received her B.S. in Chemistry from Peking University (Beijing, China) in 2004, and Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign in 2009 under the direction of Prof. Steve Granick. She completed her postdoctoral training with Prof. Jay T. Groves at the University of California at Berkeley from 2009 to 2012. Since starting her independent career in July 2012, Prof. Yan Yu has received several awards, including the NSF CAREER award (2016), the Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (2016), the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (2017), and the NIH Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (2017).