Yvonne Kobayashi is a principal research scientist at Eli Lilly & Company in Drug Discovery. Currently, her discovery efforts are in Diabetes & Complications focusing on heart failure and diabetic kidney disease. She joined Lilly as part of the Bone, Muscle, Joint & Urology Division at the end of 2012 and became an adjunct assistant professor at Indiana University School of Medicine, Department of Cellular & Integrative Physiology, in early 2014. Prior to Lilly, she was Director of Muscle Biology and in vivo Pharmacology at ARMGO Pharma, Inc. (partnership with Servier, Paris) in New York and served as principal investigator at New York Medical College and an independent contractor at Columbia University focusing on drug discovery for cardiac and skeletal muscle diseases. Before New York, Kobayashi was associate faculty in the Department of Molecular Physiology & Biophysics at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. Her NIH-funded research focused on pathogenic mechanisms and therapeutic targets in Duchenne and Limb Girdle Muscular Dystrophies, and she had collaborations with Pfizer and Titan Pharmaceuticals.
Kobayashi was also a Wellstone fellow within the Iowa Muscular Dystrophy Cooperative Research Center, investigating therapeutic targets for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. She was an NRSA-funded Cardiovascular Center post-doctoral fellow under Dr. Kevin P. Campbell at Iowa investigating cardiomyopathies associated with Limb Girdle Muscular Dystrophies.
Kobayashi received her Ph.D. in membrane biochemistry from the Krannert Institute of Cardiology at Indiana University School of Medicine, studying cardiac and skeletal muscle mechanisms of calcium uptake and release.
