Prof. Yolanda Schaerli is Associate Professor at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland in the Department of Fundamental Microbiology,  where she heads a research group in bacterial synthetic biology.

Prof. Schaerli studied at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland and at Imperial College, London, UK before she carried out a PhD at the University of Cambridge, UK. She then joined the EMBL/CRG Systems Biology Research Unit at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), Barcelona, Spain, to do a postdoc with Prof. Mark Isalan and Prof. James Sharpe. Her post-doc was funded by a Marie-Curie Marie Curie Intra-European fellowship and a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) fellowship.

In 2014 she returned to her home country Switzerland to start as junior group leader funded by an SNSF Amizione grant at the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich. In 2017 she started as Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at the University of Lausanne and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2023.

Research in her laboratory uses synthetic biology to build and study synthetic circuits in bacteria, with a focus on gene regulatory networks involved in spatiotemporal pattern formation. The group also develops novel tools and approaches for synthetic biology. For example, they demonstrated that CRISPR interference (CRISPRi) can be used to build dynamic and multistable synthetic gene circuits.