My Mom

And at the moment of the [Algerian] independence when my father had finally been liberated from jail and was actually involved in rebuilding his country, my mom actually at this time went to Algeria for the first time as a young French woman. She was a professor and she wanted to go there because she felt it was important for countries that had actually committed this activity on the world to actually engage themselves in repair and reparation. She became a teacher to teach adults how to read because Algeria was left with only 300 Algerians that had gone to university and we had to rebuild the country with no education. So, my mother was part of those very engaged young French [people] that went back to Algeria and that's where she met my father.

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.