Ya. A. Virolainen was graduated from the Faculty of Physics of St. Petersburg State University in 1995 and became a graduate student under the guidance of professors from St. Petersburg State University and the Max Planck Institute of Metrology, Hamburg, Germany, where she had internship several times.
In 2000 she defended her thesis on ground-based thermal IR-spectroscopic remote sensing method and received a Ph.D. in physics and mathematics. After that she received a fellowship for young scientists from the international association INTAS. For her scientific work, Yana Virolainen received several research grants from the government of St. Petersburg and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research. She actively participates in international conferences and joint projects with the LISA department of the University of Paris-Est (France) and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany), as well as in projects with Russian colleagues from various institutes.
The main direction of her research is the study of the spatial and temporal variability of atmospheric gases based on remote sensing data and local measurements, as well as the results of numerical modeling. She specializes in the following areas: measurement of trace gaseous in the atmosphere by various methods of remote sensing; monitoring and analysis of variability of atmospheric parameters: aerosols, trace gas, meteorological parameters; comparison of experimental data and results of numerical simulation; statistical analysis of data. She has experience in supervising scientific work of undergraduate students, preparation of scientific events.
Author of over 60 scientific papers. Her Hirsch index in Web of Science and Scopus is 9.