Yasmine Belkaid
Yasmine Belkaid is an Algerian-born immunologist who studies how the microbes that live on the body shape the immune system. Since January 2024 she has led the Institut Pasteur in Paris. She was born in Algiers in August 1968.
Yasmine Belkaid is an Algerian-born immunologist who studies how the microbes that live on the body shape the immune system. Since January 2024 she has led the Institut Pasteur in Paris. She was born in Algiers in August 1968.
Her father, Aboubakr Belkaïd, was an Algerian politician and minister, and her mother was French.
Belkaid studied biochemistry at the University of Science and Technology Houari Boumediene (USTHB) in Algiers. In 1996 she received a doctorate in immunology from Université Paris-Sud and the Institut Pasteur.
That year she joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States. After 3 years at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, from 2002 to 2005, she returned to the NIH, where she founded and directed its Microbiome Program.
Her research showed how bacteria on the skin and in the gut train the immune system. She was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2017 and to the French Académie des sciences in December 2024. In 2026 she received the Collen-Jeantet Prize for Translational Medicine in Geneva.
The Institut Pasteur appointed her as its head on 29 March 2023, and she took office on 2 January 2024. She is the second woman to lead the institute. In September 2026 President Abdelmadjid Tebboune received her in Algiers as a member of the new High Council of Algerian Scientists Abroad.
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