Yu Jiantuo is the Deputy Secretary-General of the China Development Research Foundation, first joining the foundation in 2009. He was formerly the Research Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center (2001-2005), Researcher and Assistant Director at the Center for Human and Economic Development Studies at Peking University (2005-2007), and Project Consultant of UNDP China (2007-2008). In 2008, he was a visiting scholar at the Poverty and Human Development Research Center at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, and in 2018, he was a visiting scholar at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in the United States. His main research areas include urbanization and regional development, international development cooperation, poverty and inequality, theories and practices of human development, and rural finance, among others.

In October 2020, Yu Jiantuo organized the CAA lecture series “T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land“, a mandatory ICAST course.