His family owned a winery where he became interested in the microorganisms involved in brewing beer and fermenting wine.

He studied chemical engineering at Technical University Delft, writing a dissertation on the pectinases of Penicillium chrysogenum.

After completing his PhD in 1943, he accepted a faculty position at Berkeley, before moving to the food science department of UC Davis in 1954.

During the 1950s, he wrote several classic scientific papers, published in Nature on yeast pectinases with Arnold Demain.

[7] In 1997, Yuzo Yamada published Phaffomyces, which is a genus of fungi within the Saccharomycetales order, also named in his honour..[9][10] Through his 60-year career he collected 6400 yeast strains from animals, soil and plants (including over 1000 from cacti), from countries all around the world.