Maria Yazdanbakhsh

Maria Yazdanbakhsh (born 1959) is a Dutch immunologist who is Professor of Cellular Immunology of Parasitic Infections and Head of the Department of Parasitology at the Leiden University Medical Center. She was elected Fellow of the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2023.

Early life and education
Yazdanbakhsh was born in Goslar. She completed her undergraduate studies at King's College London with a master's in medical parasitology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She moved to the University of Amsterdam for her doctoral research, where she studied the immunobiology of eosinophilia. She was postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London.

Research and career
Yazdanbakhsh launched her independent scientific career at Leiden in 1989. Having focused on the cellular immunology of worm infections, her research considers the interaction of the human immune system with parasites. She works between her research laboratory in the Leiden University Medical Center and clinical trials across Africa and Asia. She has primarily focussed on vaccines to prevent inflammatory diseases and parasitic infection. She was appointed professor at the Leiden University Medical Center in 2005.

Yazdanbalhsh showed that, alongside detrimental effects, parasitic infections modify the immune system to prevent inflammatory disease. Her work challenged the immunological origins of the hygiene hypothesis, showing instead that regulatory immune responses (not Th1- and Th2-helper cell balance) is responsible for changing disease profiles. In her studies of low and middle income countries she has shown that exposure to parasites and microorganisms overrides genetic factors.

Awards and honours

 * 2020 Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
 * 2020 Elected to the Academia Europaea
 * 2020 Delphine Parrott Lecture of Glasgow University
 * 2021 Spinoza Prize
 * 2022 ERC Advanced Grant
 * 2023 Elected Fellow of European Molecular Biology Organization