Dr. Yu is the Director of the Cardiovascular Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, and recipient of the Charles and Elizabeth Sanders Endowed Chair at Harvard Medical School. His work has focused on understanding how specificity and function are encoded by signals of the bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) and TGF-beta signaling pathways to regulate development, physiologic homeostasis, and disease. His laboratory has explored these roles in pulmonary vascular and cardiovascular disease, bone biology and heterotopic ossification (HO), and in anemia and iron metabolism. His laboratory has leveraged small molecule, genetic, and other pharmacologic approaches to probe the functions of this pathway.  This work has led to the development of promising novel therapies for pulmonary arterial hypertension, heterotopic ossification, and iron deficiency anemia, with several molecules that are currently in Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials. The overarching goals of his laboratory are to understand how this pathway achieves contextual specificity in development and disease, and how it integrates inflammatory and regenerative signals to mediate adaptive and maladaptive responses to injury.