Yishu is from Xian, the city with the Terracotta Army, China. She went to Fudan University in Shanghai for her bachelor degree majoring in chemistry. During her undergraduate research, she worked with Huisheng Peng on developing carbon-nanotube based wearable electronic devices. She then obtained her PhD degree with Emily Weiss at Northwestern. In the Weiss lab, she started as a physical chemist monitoring decay dynamics of the exciton in nanoparticles and then moved to nanoparticle photocatalysis based on unique photophysical features she noticed with spectroscopy. In 2022, Yishu joined the research group of Chris Chang at UC Berkeley for postdoc research. She switched to biological systems and extended the activity-based bioimaging technique from fluorescence confocal to stimulate Raman scattering.