The last paper I would like to talk about is one of Ai Ing Lim that is actually a paper we published in Science in 2021. And this paper actually is also aligned a little bit with this one and it's a paper that explores very important questions. Ai Ing came to my laboratory very, very interested by the concept of what happened when you intersect infection and early life. We know that this developmental stage of the features, but also [what happens to] the young child, could actually be an open window of vulnerability, so she experimentally explored how an acute infection during pregnancy can have long-term consequences and she was able to demonstrate that the tissue stem cells of the gut of the fetus can be influenced by the inflammatory media of the mother and this led to a permanent remodeling of the immune system of the gut of the offspring, creating now a loop of predisposition to inflammatory disorders.

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.