After earning his Bachelor's degree at UCLA, Yeates stayed on to do his PhD research under the direction of Prof. Douglas Rees. There he helped determine the crystal structure of the bacterial photosynthetic reaction center as part of a team racing to determine the first crystal structures of membrane proteins. He then moved to The Scripps Research Institute to do his postdoctoral research on the structure of poliovirus with Prof. James Hogle. Yeates returned to UCLA in 1990 to join the Faculty in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. His interdisciplinary research, combining molecular biology with computing and mathematics, has focused on macromolecular structure and computational genomics. His research findings include: an explanation for why proteins crystallize in certain favored arrangements, the discovery of thermophilic microbes rich in intracellular disulfide bonds, co-development of phylogenetic profile methods in genomics, development of designed protein cages or 'nanohedra', the discovery of novel topological features such as slipknots in thermostable proteins, and the elucidation of the structures of the carboxysome shell proteins. Yeates is a member of the Molecular Biology Institute, the California Nanosystems Institute, the Institute of Genomics and Proteomics, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has published approximately 100 research papers.