In 1973, Tsai-Fan Yu became the first woman to be appointed a full professor at Mount Sinai. She joined the Mount Sinai Hospital faculty in 1957 and remained there for the rest of her career.

She was a renowned Chinese-American physician and researcher known for her pioneering work on gout. Yu’s research helped make gout a curable disease, and she discovered medicines still used today to treat and prevent gout and kidney stones.

She published more than 220 scientific journal articles before retiring in 1992, research that was continuously funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) for 26 years. Overall, she is estimated to have worked with more than 4,000 patients suffering from gout.