William Yu, PhD

William Yu is an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto.

He did his undergraduate work at Indiana University (IU) on a Wells Scholarship, majoring in mathematics, chemistry, and Germanic Studies. He completed his master’s work at Imperial College London on a Marshall Scholarship. While there, he applied network partitioning techniques to modeling protein dynamics and developed a novel local, multi-resolution method for community detection in complex networks.

Afterwards, the Hertz Fellowship enabled him to get his PhD in applied math at MIT, where he developed fast compression and search algorithms for processing and analyzing next-generation genomic sequencing data. After his PhD, William was a postdoc at the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, working on sketching and streaming algorithms for fast and private queries on large patient record databases.

In 2019, he joined the University of Toronto as an assistant professor of mathematics. In his ever-diminishing free time, William enjoys learning movement, most recently recreational gymnastics.