Yukiko Yamashita is a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Biology, where she is also an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her study is centered on the mystery of germline immortality that supported the continuation of multicellular life for 1.5 billion years. Within this scope, she broadly studies asymmetric stem cell division, the maintenance of ribosomal DNA, functions of satellite DNA in cell biology and evolution.