Director of the Center for Human Immunology and Founding the NIAID Microbiome Program

What happened at the time [that I was working in Cincinnati] is another position reopened at the NIH, and I have to admit that I really loved the model of the NIH. The NIH is an interesting place because the intramural program has hard money, which is very different from other environments. At the time, I became very, very passionate about the concept of the microbiome and at the time, the microbiome was not very much part of the equation in science. I realized that if I really wanted to transform my career as an immunologist working on immunoregulation and regulatory T cells and do something completely different, going in a place that gave me hard money for a few years to take these risks was actually extremely beneficial. So, I did this journey and I went back to Washington at the NIH to start a program on microbiome and immunology. I stayed at the NIH for a while. I came back as a tenure track, got tenured, started to build a microbiome program at NIAID. I also was a director of the Center for Human Immunology. I built a new department, hired PIs, so I moved through the ranks of the NIH.

NIAID’s Focus on Research, Public Health, and Global Health

I enjoyed this environment [at the NIH very much], the collaborative aspect. I love also the focus of the [National] Institute of [Allergy and] Infectious Diseases. This is something that I'm extremely passionate about, this field of research that is not the field of research that is often taken by industry. I think this is a place usually of academic research and nonprofit to actually continue to explore infectious disease, emerging infectious disease, so I love the mission of the NIAID that was research, but also public health that was very much also on global health and I really felt very, very aligned with the mission of the institute.

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.