Jiankai Yu joined the Center of Nuclear Energy Systems (CANES) as a research scientist in January 2023. Prior to joining the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) at MIT, he worked at University of Tennessee Knoxville (UTK) for a short period on the application of the open-source Monte Carlo code - OpenMC in fusion energy system. Prior to UTK, he was a post-doctoral associate in the MIT NSE department working on OpenMC code development and autonomous control system development designed for a subcritical nuclear facility - the MIT graphite exponential pile (MGEP). Before that, he was a researcher at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) Nuclear Engineering department working on the development of the Monte Carlo (MCS) based Neutronics/Thermal-Hydraulics/Fuel-Performance coupling system.

He received his Ph.D. from Tsinghua University in 2015 for the methodologies investigation and code development of the neutron-induced nuclear data evaluation, processing, and the application in Reactor Monte Carlo code (RMC).