Professor Dr. Yvonne Lim Ai Lian is currently the Associate Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic and International) at Universiti Malaya and a senior professor at the Department of Parasitology, Faculty of Medicine. She also serves as a University Senate Member and the Academy of Sciences Malaysia (ASM) Council Member. Prior to this, she has taken on leadership roles as the Deputy Dean (Research) at the Faculty of Medicine, Director of International Relations Office and Associate Vice Chancellor of Global Engagement, Universiti Malaya. She was also a former president of the Malaysian Society of Parasitology and Tropical Medicine (MSPTM). 

Her research focuses on host-parasite-environment interactions among underserved indigenous communities from a range of socioeconomic and ecological gradients. For the past 28 years, she has been studying infectious diseases such as helminthiasis, malaria, filariasis, sarcocystosis, dengue, scrub typhus and other diseases in the Orang Asli of Peninsular Malaysia. In addition, using multidisciplinary advance approaches, together with collaborators from New York University, their work in unravelling the mechanisms of how low levels of helminth (worm) infection promote growth of probiotic gut microbiota was published in Science 2016. These gut microbiome works has been expanded to HIV and cancer patients as well as to oral microbiome and skin microbiome.

As a member of the International Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) in the Infectious Diseases Data Observatory Schistosomiasis and Soil-Transmitted Helminthiasis Data Treatment Platform, she contributes her expertise to global research initiatives. Her involvement in shaping national policies, including the National Policy for the Development of Orang Asli (Indigenous), underscores her commitment to community welfare.

Her work has been funded by various national and international grants (eg., NIH, USA). She has published more than 250 peer-reviewed scientific articles, 9 book chapters and 3 books. She has supervised 45 postgraduate students and hosted researchers from a vast network of local and international partnerships (eg. US, UK, Australia, Germany, Japan, Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore). She was a visiting researcher at the Scottish Parasite Diagnostic and Reference Laboratory (formerly Scottish Parasite Diagnostic Laboratory), Glasgow, Scotland; a visiting fellow at the Department of Veterinary Science, University of Melbourne, Australia and was appointed a visiting professor at the the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA and the Department of Molecular Parasitology and Tropical Diseases, Taipei Medical University, Taiwan.

She has received numerous awards and recognitions, among which were the MSPTM Medal (2008) for being an outstanding young scientist; the Universiti Malaya Excellent Lecturer award for the Science Disciplines (2015); the Top Research Scientists of Malaysia Award (2016) and inducted as a Fellow of the eminent Academy of Sciences Malaysia (2017). She was cited by Stanford University as one of the top 2% scientists for the years 2019, 2021 and 2023 in her field of expertise. In 2021, she was awarded the Fulbright Scholar Award 2021/2022 for an attachment at the Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH), USA. Recently, she was appointed the co-chair of the Asia Pacific Women in Leadership (APWiL) Mentoring Programme from 2022-2025 and a member of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU) International Advisory Committee.