Wu graduated from the Department of Physics of Nanjing Higher Normal School (later renamed National Central University and Nanjing University), and was later associated with the Department of Physics at Tsinghua University. He served as president of National Central University and Jiaotong University in Shanghai. When he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago he studied x-ray and electron scattering, and verified the Compton effect which gave Arthur Compton the Nobel Prize in Physics.