Ilhem Messaoudi, PhD
Dr. Messaoudi is an Assistant Scientist at the Division of Pathobiology and Immunology at the Oregon National Primate Research Center. She has a joint appointment as an Assistant Professor at the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute, Oregon Health and Science University. Her research focuses on understanding the mechanisms underlying the decline in immune function observed with increasing age. The ultimate goal of Dr. Messaoudi’s laboratory is to design strategies to improve immune response to vaccination and infection in elderly patients, thereby reducing morbidity and mortality from infectious diseases.
After completing graduate training at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Institute and the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Dr. Messaoudi investigated how T cell clonal expansions arise in aged organisms. T cell clonal expansions are memory T cells, derived from the same T cell, that accumulate with increasing age and interfere with the generation of protective immune responses. Dr. Messaoudi also showed that caloric restriction initiated during early adulthood can delay the aging of the immune system in nonhuman primates, thereby reducing the incidence of T cell clonal expansions and improving immunity.
As a Brookdale Fellow, Dr. Messaoudi will study the impact of menopause on the aging of the immune system in older women. The goal of this project is to investigate how loss of the female sex hormones estrogen and progesterone affects T cell function and response to vaccination. Furthermore, she will investigate whether the administration of estrogen replacement therapy can delay or reverse aspects of immune senescence.
Dr. Messaoudi’s primary mentor is Henryk Urbanski, PhD, and her secondary mentor is Louis Picker, MD.
Brookdale Leadership in Aging Fellow Class of 2009