In a historical precedent, the Algerian scientist Yasmine Belkaid was appointed to head the Pasteur Institute in France
Last Wednesday, the board of directors of the French Pasteur Institute appointed Algerian scholar Yasmine Belkaid as its general director, according to a statement issued by the same institute.
Professor Belkaid will assume her position in January 2024, for a period of 6 years, when she will succeed Professor Stuart Cole, becoming the second woman to hold this position and the 17th Director General since the establishment of the Institute in 1887 by Louis Pasteur.
Professor Yasmine Belkaid, born in 1968 in Algiers, is a world-renowned researcher. She is a graduate of the University of Science and Technology Houari Boumediene in Bab Ezzouar, majoring in biology. She has won several international awards and has published more than 200 papers in immunology and microbiology.
Her scientific journey began with training in the field of infectious diseases at the Pasteur Institute, and her career included parasitology, microbiology, medical entomology, virology, in addition to tissue immunology, microbiome and human immunity.
Professor Belkaid currently directs the Center for Human Immunology at the National Institutes of Health
(NIH), the US agency responsible for medical and biomedical research.
and founder and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Microbiome Program at the National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, MD, US) at NIAID, and also developed the Host Immunology and Microbiome division.
According to the same source, Professor Belkaid pledged to make the Pasteur Institute one of the main research institutions in the life sciences, and to strengthen its role in the fields of monitoring, prevention and identification of emerging pathogens on a global scale.
Source: websites