PhD from the Institut Pasteur

I was on the journey, but I had absolutely no idea what it meant to [have a] career in science. I was really naive. I had no idea. I knew that I wanted to do biology. I didn't know which form, which shape, what to do with it, I just knew that I kept going. I ended up doing a PhD in [the] Pasteur Institute in Paris on innate immune responses to a microbe, but at the end of my PhD I was completely lost. I don't even think I was a great PhD student; I was just a passionate one. I'm not sure I was that altogether, but I didn't know how to translate that into a career. I don't think I even saw myself as a PI or as an independent investigator. I just knew I wanted to do science. That's all that I knew, so when I finished my PhD, I had a repose. I thought I was maybe not good enough for what I wanted to do, and this position opened in the [United] States and I decided to give a try. I didn't know how to speak English. I was a single mom at the time and I took my little boy and the two of us ended up in the States. I'm not speaking English and meeting for the first time the person that was going to become my postdoctoral advisor.

Facing my Insecurities

I finished my PhD six months after the assassination of my father, so it was a complex moment in my life, but more importantly, I don't really think I had the maturity in terms of my work to really project myself in the next stage. I was very, very lost at the end. I thought I was not good enough. I was not formed enough. I didn't have my own ideas. I was feeling very insecure, but the one thing that may characterize my journey is yes, I may be afraid, I may feel incompetent, but I always try and that is really what I did. If I have another advice to give, [it] is [that] you may not control all the pieces of the puzzle, but just give it a try. You have nothing to lose to try and it's always been the way I function. I don't function because I know where I'm going, but I'm giving a try to something. And this is really what I did.

Postdoc at the National Institutes of Health

The postdoc was not like today. I have my students and they're incredible, [saying] “I'm going to do that, I'm going to do that”. And I'm looking at them. They're so together. I was not like that at all. I was very much stumbling in the dark and literally never have met this PI before. And in fact, the job I had in the [United] States was because someone in my laboratory in Pasteur didn't take the job, so I was not even the primary candidate for the job. So, I was literally “I guess he is looking for someone else, I'm going to show up”. It was literally that, but it turned out fantastically well because I arrived in a laboratory where it was incredibly international. I mean it was parasitic disease at the NIH.

It was people from all around the planet. It was people doing molecular biology of parasites, which at the time was really emerging together with immunology, with people doing actual field work. The place was full of passion, interesting journeys, interesting people, collaboration, and I discovered an environment that was so magical that really, I felt I was made for that. So, I had a wonderful experience as a postdoctoral fellow doing research and I became fascinated by the mechanisms that allow the immune system and the microbe to coexist. How a microbe is able to stay inside the immune system is an enigma. How the microbe is utilizing the immune system as its own home, living inside the very same cell that is supposed to combat it, that became a really big question for me and I was able to do that at the NIH. So, I did my postdoc and I think I was very lucky to stumble into some mechanism that explained this persistence of microbe.

Working as a Staff Scientist and Becoming Independent

I finished my postdoc and once again, same scenario [as] when I was a student, I had no idea what I was going to do. [I felt that] I'm not good enough, I'm not competent enough. I had a lot of anxiety about my own capacity to project myself as a PI. And the department was only men. I was surrounded by role models. None of them looked like me, none of them. So, naturally I guess, or maybe because of myself and my insecurity, I didn't project myself. So, I became a staff scientist for a couple of years, so I didn't become independent immediately. Then, I remember once I was applying to another staff scientist position and I met someone, Steve Katz, who told me “What the heck are you doing?” This is literally what he said. Why are you not independent? And this very simple conversation made me realize, maybe I should try, and this is really, once again, what I did. Someone was opening a department, Chris Karp, at Cincinnati and told me, why don't you come? And I said, okay, I'm going to try. This seems so unplanned and, again, when you tell the narrative to the scene it looks so nice, but the reality was really like that. The PI position I got was because this person I knew opened a new department somewhere [and] once again, I didn't apply. It was literally an opportunity; I'm going to take it.

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.