Wu died by suicide at her home in Chicago in 2024 after the forced closure of her laboratory at Northwestern University, a place she served as professor for nearly two decades.

[1][3] She traveled to the United States for graduate studies and received a Doctor of Philosophy in cancer biology from the Stanford University School of Medicine in 1991.

[2] Wu explicitly stated "Dedicated to the memory of martyrs of June Fourth, 1989" on page 8 at the beginning of her dissertation.

[1] In 2005, Wu joined Northwestern University where her research concentrated on two closely related biological processes, RNA splicing and the role of regulatory RNA-binding proteins.

[5] She focused on pre-mRNA splicing, a crucial process in eukaryotic gene expression that played a significant role in genetic diversity.

[5] Her lab also studied the role of neuronal guidance cues in tumor metastasis and developed new approaches to address inflammatory diseases.