Our Team

Kai Yu received his B.S. and M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Zhejiang University in 2009 and 2012 respectively. He received his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2018. He completed post-doctoral training in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in one year, and had served as a Research Scientist and special faculty there since 2019.

Dr. Yu has made original research contributions to the field of transcranial focused ultrasound neuromodulation, functional biomedical imaging, and neuroengineering. He is a pioneer in developing the non-invasive EEG source imaging for localizing the ultrasound induced neural activations in the in vivo brain models. His research works on the EEG source imaging informed transcranial focused ultrasound neuromodulation on an animal model and later in humans were selected as a cover article and a featured article by the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, respectively.

His work on the intrinsic functional cell-type specificity of transcranial focused ultrasound neuromodulation was featured and highlighted by Nature Communications on “From brain to behaviour”. His recent work on enhancing brain-computer interface in humans using transcranial focused ultrasound neuromodulation was also published by Nature Communications.

Dr. Yu joins UConn BME this fall as an assistant professor, and the mission of Yu Lab is to develop computational tools and neuromodulation technologies to study how the brain encodes and processes endogenous and exogenous inputs. The lab seeks to elucidate fundamental neural mechanisms and translate the technologies into innovative diagnostic and therapeutic strategies for brain disorders.