Maria Yazdanbakhsh - Biography#

Maria Yazdanbakhsh is a Professor at Leiden University (The Netherlands) and heads the department of Parasitology at Leiden University Center of Infectious Diseases. She is a world renowned expert in immunoparasitology. She obtained her BSc at King’s College London and her MSc at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She did her PhD at University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. After obtaining a Marie Curie Scholarship, she moved to Imperial College in London as a post-doctoral fellow to work on molecular biology of parasitism. Upon her return to the Netherlands she set up her research group to study host-parasite interaction at Leiden University. Maria Yazdanbakhsh is one of the few in the world, who successfully combines complex biomedical studies with field work in low/middle income countries (LMIC) where conditions for research are challenging, yet they provide unprecedented opportunities to gain insight into the molecular wiring of our immune system and its interaction with microorganisms/parasites. Her ground-breaking work in Indonesia and Africa has challenged the immunological basis of the Hygiene Hypothesis. It has introduced the concept that the immunoregulation driven by chronic parasitic infections can play an important role to control inflammation underlying allergic disorders and insulin resistance. Her seminal papers (Lancet/Science) have inspired researches worldwide to address the immune regulatory effects of chronic helminth infections. Moreover, she has been at the forefront of identifying parasite-derived molecules with immunomodulatory potential, which can act as novel therapeutic agents for inflammatory diseases.

Through her populations studies in LMIC, she has compared immunological profiles between rural and urban areas, with distinct exposures to microorganisms, to show that responses to some vaccines can be highly compromised in rural areas of the world. She continues to innovate, evident from her efforts to establish human infection models at her department and to apply state of the art high-dimensional immunological analysis to precisely map the dynamics of immune activation and regulation. The same approach applied to interrogation of the immune profiles of rural and urban populations is identifying mechanisms underlying compromised vaccine responses.