He was a National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) researcher, Tsinghua University professor, and Founding Director of the Institute of Engineering Thermophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

He graduated from the temporary National Southwestern Associated University and was awarded a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States.

He established China's first turbomachinery program at Tsinghua and developed a nonorthogonal curvilinear coordinate system to improve computational accuracy.

[2] In 1950, he pioneered the three-dimensional flow theory,[3] which was considered by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers as one of the two most important breakthroughs of the 1950s in the development of turbomachinery, together with the invention of computers.

[2] With the outbreak of the Korean War, Sino-American relations turned openly hostile, and Wu and Li decided they could no longer work for the US military.

To avoid suspicion of the US government, the family flew to Britain in August for vacation, and travelled to China through Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union, arriving at the end of the year.

[2] The following year, he established a research lab in turboengines and internal combustion at the Institute of Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

In the ensuing Socialist Education Movement, he was sent to perform manual work in rural Hongtong County in Shanxi for three years.

[2] When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, Wu was protected by Premier Zhou Enlai and PLA Air Force officers who valued his scientific contributions.

[2] After the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 and the normalization of Sino-American relations in 1979, Wu led a group of Chinese scientists to visit the United States for the first time since he returned to China in 1954.

At the Institute of Engineering Thermophysics, he and his colleagues developed shock-fitting and artificial compressibility methods for solutions in two- and three-dimensional transonic flows.

[2] In 1990, Wu and Li were invited to teach at Clemson University for four months, and he gave a series of lectures at the NASA Lewis Research Center.