I was very, very lucky also to have fantastic family and grandmothers in particular. I had an Algerian grandmother who had never gone to school, but she had this incredible belief in education and she was also herself very involved in learning about plants and medicine and she had all this knowledge, this very fundamental knowledge that was often owned by women. I found it absolutely magical, this knowledge that those women had to care for others. So, I learned through her and through all the magic that she actually brought into our life to the potions and all of those. From my other grandmother, in France, she was a pharmacist and she was a pharmacist that had done a little bit of research in her life, and of course at the time women were not really allowed to be scientists, very few.

So, I learned through her another aspect which is really, and she was actually making medicine at the time. Pharmacists were actually making their own syrups and so forth, and so I spent my whole childhood in the summer with my grandmother learning, looking at her, observing her in the laboratories. Also, she was trained as an herbalist, which means that she knew about plants and about the medicinal properties of plants. For me, actually going into the forest with my grandmother and actually looking [at] how each plant could become a therapy, I found it absolutely magic. So, I was really surrounded by both grandmothers that were really people that knew about how you extract knowledge from the environment for therapy, so I think this really was my childhood.

Yasmine Belkaid is a renowned scientist whose research focuses on the relationship between microbes and the immune system. She is the President as well as the head of the Metaorganism laboratory at the Institut Pasteur.

Belkaid earned her Master’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Science and Technology Houari Boumediene in Algiers, and a Master of Advanced Studies (DEA) from Paris-Sud University. In 1996, she earned her PhD in immunology from the Institut Pasteur, where she studied innate immune responses to leishmania infection. Belkaid then moved to the United States for a postdoctoral fellowship in intracellular parasite biology at NIAID’s Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases (NIH).

Belkaid has received numerous awards including the Robert Koch Prize, the Lurie Prize in Biomedical Sciences, the Sanofi-Institut Pasteur Prize, and the AAI Excellence in Mentoring Award. She also serves on the committees of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, the Microbiome Technical Advisory Group at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the NIH Anti-Racism Steering Committee, the American Society of Microbiology, and the Genentech Scientific Resource Board.