Yannan is a Senior Research Fellow of the Department of Statistics, and a Senior Biostatistician of the Statistical Consulting Centre (SCC) in the University of Auckland. As a founder member of the SCC, she has worked collaboratively with research organizations and the pharmaceutical industry on a large number of consulting projects including clinical trials and national registries; and providing statistical advice on study design, data monitoring, statistical analysis and reporting, and expert review. She is a named study investigator and principal statistician in a number of research programmes and projects fully funded by the Health Research Council (HRC) of New Zealand and Ministry of Health.
Yannan was elected to the membership of International Statistical Institute (ISI) in 2012, an invited statistical reviewer for medical journals, and is a member of the New Zealand Statistical Association (NZSA). To date she has published over 170 peer reviewed journal articles, and her research areas include clinical trials in nutrition and physical activity, alcohol and smoking cessation, diabetes and heart diseases, newborn and pregnant women; cluster randomized trial design; national survey design and analysis; longitudinal studies; case-control sampling and missing data problems.