Instead, she worked as a biophysics technician at the Donner Radiation Labs in UC Berkeley (1969–71), and was a research associate at the National Cancer Institute, NIH, in Bethesda, Maryland, US (1975–76).

In 1980, she began her PhD studies at the University of Toronto in medical genetics under the supervision of Helios Murialdo, which resulted in four publications, including one in Cell.

[4] In 1988, she moved to the Department of Molecular and Medical Genetics at the University of Toronto, staying until 1993, when she became a Senior Scientist at the Wellesley Hospital Research Institute.

In May 2020, Wu received research funding to collaborate with York University Biology professor Vivian Saridakis, to investigate the hypothesis that variations in the genomic sequences of the virus play a pivotal role in geographic differences in rates of COVID-19 infection, transmission and deaths.

[5] Over the decades of her scientific career, Wu has been a visiting scientist and professor at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France (1996) and at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge (2007), where she has been a Life Member since 2008.

[3] Research from her laboratory determined that variation in the strength of V(D)J recombination signal sequence affects the pattern of Ig gene rearrangement and expression.