Yolanda obtained her PhD in Plant Molecular Biology from the University of Toronto. After completing her PhD in 2007, she joined the Saccharomyces cerevisiae omics team at the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research to complete her postdoctoral studies. In 2011, Yolanda was recruited to Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Johnson and Johnson (J&J), to introduce high-dimensional phenotyping to their small molecule discovery pipeline, at their Belgian research site.

In 2017, she joined Recursion Pharmaceuticals to utilize high-dimensional biology, computer vision and deep learning to identify small molecule therapeutics for rare diseases. She oversees the research group responsible for developing new applications of Recursion's technology platform, specifically expanding their therapeutic area focus and introducing novel disease models into the pipeline. Drug discovery at Recursion has been focused on rare diseases, and Yolanda and her team will broaden their research scope to include inflammation, infectious disease, aging and immuno-oncology.

Some career highlights include:

• Yolanda has published in over 15 peer-reviewed journals, including the high impact journal Cell.
• She received over 3 million (combined) in grant funding from IMI (European Union) and VLAIO (Flemish Government)
• Yolanda was recognized with several leadership awards during her time at J&J.

Yolanda has a 2nd degree blackbelt in Shotokan karate, enjoys gardening, cycling and loves spending time with her family.