Yu Wang is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois. Her research focuses on the metabolic modeling of the photosynthetic process in plants. She works to optimize canopy architecture and leaf biochemical properties to identify ways to achieve a higher canopy photosynthesis rate to increase yield. For the RIPE project, Yu works on mathematical modeling of plant productivity; she focuses on developing and integrating metabolic pathway models into the whole plant and production context. Her work has been published in several journals, including Plant Physiology, Journal of Experimental Botany, and Plant Cell & Environment. Yu received her bachelor’s degree in biotechnology from the University of Science and Technology of China and then went on to earn her doctorate in computational biology from the Chinese Academy of Sciences-Max Planck Institute.