The next one I really would like to discuss is another paper that I did also when I was still a tenure track. It was a paper that came from another, and I was now back at the NIH, and I started to be very interested about the mechanism of tolerance to the microbiota but also to food. How do we tolerate those extraordinary challenges? One thing that we started to, very much with this angle of regulatory T cells, we started to look at the possibility that maybe food was allowing the generation of new regulatory T cells that could allow tolerance, food tolerance. I remember this specific paper, I'm very attached to it because I was at a conference with Fiona Powrie, who became really a very good, long-term collaborator after that, and she had emerging data that were very comparable to ours and we decided to join forces. We decided to join forces and to co-submit two papers helping each other as women in science and putting those two papers together as one single big finding, so I'm very attached to this paper. First, I think it was an important discovery, which we don't really realize when we submit that they are, but it turned out to be a finding that are responsible for the acquisition of oral tolerance, but I think more important is also the story of collaboration and trust between scientists and actually her paper is also very much cited in the very same way [as] ours, and the fact that we have done that together means a lot too.

This one was published in 2007.

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.