Founder — YANA Careers

I've spent fifteen years inside the operational machinery of clinical research — at global CROs, with pharma sponsors, across three continents, and on both sides of the hiring table. I've sat in monitoring visits, audited investigator sites, escalated protocol deviations, debriefed sponsors, and watched more capable professionals than I can count fail to break into roles they were genuinely qualified for.

The industry doesn't like to admit it, but the workforce problem in clinical research isn't a talent problem — it's a systems problem. I worked with ICU nurses who understood site operations better than half the CRAs at the table. Pharmacists with sharper analytical minds than the data managers reviewing their own submissions. Lab scientists with the kind of attention to detail you can't teach — who couldn't translate any of it into a hiring narrative because no one had ever shown them how.

The talent was always there. The infrastructure to surface it wasn't.

So I built the infrastructure I wish had existed when I was starting out and trying to find my own way in. YANA Careers is the system: accredited training, simulation-tested competency, a portable Competency Passport, and an integrated placement marketplace. Not a course. Not a certification. A workforce operating system — built by someone who's actually done the work, for an industry that's about to be reshaped by AI and can't afford to leave its people behind.

We're 300+ placements in. The Sim Lab is live. The Competency Passport is in beta. We're not finished. But the architecture is here — and it's working.

If you're serious about this industry — as a professional, as an employer, or as a partner — you're in the right place.

Built by an operator. Not a textbook.