Yukiko Yamashita is a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. She is also an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her study is centered on the mystery of germline immortality. Within this scope, she broadly studies asymmetric stem cell division, the mechanisms to maintain ribosomal DNA, and functions of satellite DNA. These interests further led to investigations on how these processes lead to speciation.