She also raised funds in 1936 to build a school hospital for their alma mater, the Jinling Women's College, and earned a degree in French.

Throughout her life, Yen Wu created numerous scholarships in China, Taiwan, and the United States which bear the name of family members and allow students to further their education.

[2][3] Convinced of the importance of education, Yan Zijun hired university teachers to tutor the children from a young age in English and Chinese before they attended primary school in Shanghai.

In 1913, the family moved to Tianjin,[1] where Yan and two of her sisters, Lianyun [zh] and Youyun prepared for the entrance exams of the Chinese and Western Girls' High School.

She studied nutrition, a field which at the time was in its infancy, under Henry Clapp Sherman and Mary Swartz Rose, taking particular interest in the analysis of vitamin content in food.

[1][6] Despite her contract being renewed for another year, when Yen and Wu decided to marry, she knew her position would be terminated, as there was a policy that spouses could not work together.

They honeymooned in the United States and Yen Wu made plans to resume her studies and complete her doctoral work under Sherman at Columbia.

Together with Hsien Wu, she began researching vegetarianism, the predominant Chinese diet at the time, using white mice as subjects, a technique Yen had learned from Sherman.

Altering the vegetarian diet by adding bell peppers, cabbage, mustard greens, or rapeseed they found that growth rates were similar to the meat-eating mice and the animals had no signs of vitamin deficiencies.

The Department of Public Health and Sanitation collected materials from various groups throughout the country, including businesses, factories, farms, households, restaurants, and schools and presented their survey results to Yen and Hsien.

They noted that compared to a Western diet, there were deficiencies in high-quality protein, calcium, phosphorus, and vitamins A and D. Their conclusions were that malnutrition was the cause of the high rates of disease and mortality, as well as intellectual disabilities and short stature, prevalent among Chinese children at the time.

[1] In 1928, after the birth of her third child, Yen Wu withdrew from active work in the laboratory and focused on raising her children while compiling the research notes of her husband and assisting him in the development of his career.

She founded the Mingming School (Chinese: 明明学校) in 1934 with the aim of providing a modern comprehensive education and hired Wang Suyi, an alumnus of Columbia, as principal and a full-time teacher.

Yen Wu was a member of various civic improvement clubs and worked with her sisters to raise funds in 1936 to build a school hospital for their alma mater, the Jinling Women's College.

[1] In 1947, Hsien Wu went to the United States to work as a visiting professor at Columbia University, but was unable to return because of the Chinese Communist Revolution.

[1] Yen Wu died on 27 May 1993 at Tompkins Community Hospital in Ithaca, after a heart attack, and was buried at Forest Hills Cemetery, in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts.

At the time their work was completed, it was one of the most influential in China and led the biochemical department at Peking Union Medical College to prioritize studying nutrition.

[1] The couple's son, Ray Wu, became a noted molecular biologist at Cornell University, having "developed the first method for sequencing DNA" and was "widely recognized as one of the fathers of plant genetic engineering.