Yo-El Ju is the Barbara Burton and Reuben Morriss III Professor of Neurology at the Washington University School of Medicine.

[1][2] Clinically, she sees patients at Barnes-Jewish Hospital for parasomnia, narcolepsy, restless legs syndrome, and obstructive sleep apnea.

As of April 2023, the most cited work from her lab is their 2017 paper in Brain: A Journal of Neurology that showed cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) amyloid-beta protein level increases due to slow-wave sleep disruption.

In 2016, Ju's team published a paper in Annals of Neurology showing that CSF levels of amyloid-beta are decreased in obstructive sleep apnea patients, despite the finding that these patients had lower slow wave activity, a sign of a lull in cortical neuron synaptic activity.

This has broadened the interests of researchers to reconsider the magnitude of the role hypoxia and sleep fragmentation play in neurodegeneration and cognitive decline in individuals with obstructive sleep apnea, and to also consider downstream effects of apneic episodes on metabolite build-up, inflammation, and cerebrovascular changes as part of the causal pathway.

Later on, in 2017, Ju led a study published in Brain: A Journal of Neurology that found CSF amyloid-beta protein level increases as a result of slow-wave sleep deprivation.

This finding opened the field for future studies that specifically target preservation or enhancement of slow-wave sleep to prevent amyloid-beta deposition in Alzheimer's disease pathology.

[19] Ju was the senior author on a 2018 paper in JAMA Neurology studying how circadian rhythms are disturbed in preclinical Alzheimer's disease.

Ju collaborates with Washington University colleagues in studying sleep/circadian function and Alzheimer's disease, including David Holtzman, Erik Musiek, and Brendan Lucey, among others.

Currently, Ju's research interests include using electroencephalography to predict Alzheimer's disease and evaluating the relationship between circadian rhythm dysfunction and tau protein deposition in the brain.