About Yolanda

Yolanda McLean is a biopharmaceutical quality and operations leader with more than two decades of experience spanning small and large pharmaceutical organizations, multiple therapeutic modalities, and a range of manufacturing and development environments. Her career is rooted in Quality Control and manufacturing support, where she has built and sustained technical quality capabilities that enable reliable operations, regulatory readiness, and the delivery of innovative medicines to patients.

At Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Yolanda serves as Senior Director of Quality Business Operations & Planning, operating at the intersection of quality, strategy, and business execution. She leads enterprise quality planning, governance, and decision support, with a focus on quality risk management, system maturity, and aligning technical priorities with business objectives and resource realities.

Across her career, Yolanda has supported both large and small molecule programs and worked within organizations at very different stages of maturity. These experiences have shaped her belief that the most effective quality systems are those that are technically rigorous and designed to work for both people and science – systems that teams can understand, adopt, and sustain as organizations grow and evolve.

Yolanda brings prior board experience and a long-standing commitment to education and workforce development. She is motivated by opportunities to help align industry expectations with educational pathways, strengthening the connection between technical excellence, practical skills development, and meaningful careers in the life science