Yaga’s areas of expertise and scientific interests include gravity waves and their parameterizations in global climate models, middle atmospheric dynamics, quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO), whole atmosphere climate modeling, subseasonal-to-seasonal prediction, and geoengineering. Yaga has developed the first source spectrum parameterization of convectively generated gravity waves for climate models and has changed the parameterization of gravity waves in the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model (WACCM) to be entirely source-based. Yaga implemented a convective momentum transport parameterization in the Community Atmosphere Model (CAM) which has significantly improved the representation of El Nino Southern Oscillation, and with her work on gravity waves and vertical resolution, she was able to obtain a very realistic QBO in the NCAR CAM and WACCM.