Maria Yazdanbakhsh is professor in cellular immunology of parasitic infections and heads the department of Parasitology at Leiden University Medical Center, which engages in basic and clinical research that focuses on understanding host-pathogen interactions at the molecular, cellular and population level. Her specific research on the interaction of helminths along with other coinfections with their human host, are best studied in rural areas of low and middle income countries where burden of infectious diseases is high. With time she has come to work on profiling the immune system in at great depth using high dimensional technologies. In her department, she has supported the establishment of the controlled human infection models which comprises of infecting volunteers with various pathogens. Such models provide a great platform to test vaccines in a relatively short period of time and allow the assessment of the impact of infection on the immune system. Through decades of collaborative work with great researchers in low to middle income countries, she has developed minimally invasive methods that generate large datasets on the heterogeneity of the immune system and responses to vaccination across geographical areas. The knowledge gained is applied to the development of vaccines that are effective not only in high-income but also in low-income countries. She was awarded the Spinoza prize and membership of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and EMBO.