Yukiko Yamashita

Yukiko Yamashita is Professor of Biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she is also a Core Member of Whitehead Institute. Using Drosophila male germline, Yamashita and her team probe questions regarding how germline stem cells divide asymmetrically to generate one stem cell and one differentiating cell, and how the differentiating germ cells undergo a series of developmental processes to produce gametes (sperm cells) to allow transmission of the genome to the next generation.

Yamashita earned both her B.S. in Biology and her Ph.D. in Biophysics from Kyoto University, where she conducted her graduate research in the lab of Mitsuhiro Yanagida. From 2001 to 2006, she did postdoctoral research in developmental biology in Margaret Fuller’s lab at Stanford University. Yamashita was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2011 and became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 2014. She previously taught at University of Michigan.