Yasmine Belkaid

Yasmine Belkaid (; born 1968) is an Algerian immunologist who is best known for her work studying host-microbe interactions in tissues and immune regulation to microbes. Belkaid currently serves as the director of the NIAID Microbiome program. On March 29, 2023, she was appointed as President of the Pasteur Institute for a six-year term, starting from January 2024. She is the daughter of the former Algerian politician Abu Bekr Belkaid.

Early life and education Belkaid was born and raised in Algiers, Algeria. Her father was Algerian politician Aboubakr Belkaid, who was assassinated on September 28, 1995, during the Black Decade. She received her bachelor's and master's degrees in biochemistry from the University of Sciences and Technology Houari Boumediene as well as a Master of Advanced Studies from University of Paris-Sud. She earned her doctorate in immunology from the Pasteur Institute in 1996, where she studied innate immune responses to Leishmania infection.

Career

Academia Following graduate school, she moved to the United States for a postdoctoral fellowship at NIAID's Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases. In 2002, she joined the faculty of the Division of Molecular Immunology in Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center before returning to NIAID in 2005 as Head of the Mucosal Immunology Unit in the Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases. In 2008, she became adjunct Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Research Yasmine Belkaid, accompanied by her mother, was the guest of honor for the 50th anniversary of Abou Bekr Belkaid University in Tlemcen, named in memory of her late father. Belkaid's research focuses on untangling the mechanisms underlying host-microbe interactions in the gastrointestinal tract and on the skin, which are natural barrier sites between the host's inner workings and their external environment. This also includes the role microbiota play in promoting immunity against infection against other harmful pathogens.

Belkaid's research also led to the discovery of certain skin microbes that play an important role in immune defense. Belkaid's group also studies what happens when there are imbalances in our microbiome. Belkaid's research has advanced scientific understanding of how shifts in microbiota can contribute to disease, particularly chronic inflammatory diseases like Crohn's disease and Psoriasis.

Awards and honors

2013 – Gold Medal, International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology 2016 – Sanofi-Pasteur International Mid-career Award 2016 – Elected Fellow, American Academy of Microbiology 2017 – Emil von Behring Prize 2017 – Elected to the National Academy of Sciences 2018 – Elected to the National Academy of Medicine 2019 – Lurie Prize in Biomedical Sciences, Foundation for the National Institutes of Health 2020 – Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2021 – Robert Koch Prize 2024 – Arab Genius Award 2025 – Foreign Member of the Royal Society 2026 – Louis-Jeantet Prize