Massachusetts General Hospital

BiographyDr. Paul Yu completed his A.B. in Philosophy and a B.S. in Biological Sciences at Stanford University. He subsequently completed M.D. and Ph.D. (Immunology) degrees at Duke University, followed by Internal Medicine residency training at the University of California at San Francisco, and clinical and research fellowships in Cardiovascular Disease at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Yu joined the faculty in Cardiology and the Cardiovascular Research Center in 2006. Dr. Yu is board certified in Internal Medicine and Cardiovascular Medicine, and is Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Research

Dr. Yu maintains a clinical practice in general cardiology, seeing patients with known coronary artery disease or who have significant risk factors, patients with heart failure, and patients with heart rhythm disturbances. Dr. Yu has a special interest in pulmonary vascular disease. Heis particularly interested in how certain individuals are predisposed to developing vascular diseases such as pulmonary arterial hypertension or vascular calcification.

A major effort of Dr. Yu's laboratory is focused on understanding how certain signaling pathways, including the bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) and transforming growth factor beta (TGF-beta) pathways, may be dysregulated in pulmonary vascular disease, and vascular calcification. These signals are thought to determine how vascular progenitor cells grow and mature, and may contribute to conditions in which the vessel wall functions abnormally, or develops lesions which interfere with its normal function.