Nikaïa Smith

Nikaïa Smith is a PostDoc at the Institut Pasteur of Paris, in Paris, France. She received her graduate in Sciences of the Medicine Specialty Pharmacology and molecular Pharmacochemistry from the University Paris Descartes, France and a Ph.D. with honors also from the the University Paris Descartes, France (2015).

During Dr. Smith’s training, in Dr. Jean-Philippe Herbeuval's lab, she worked on finding new pathways to modulate type I interferon production in plasmacytoid dendritic cells (pDCs) upon viral infections. During her first post-doctoral study, in the same lab, she pursue her work on immune modulation and extended it to autoimmune diseases. As a post-doctoral fellow (2017-2019) in Prof. Frank Kirchhoff and Prof. Jan Münch's lab at the Institute of Molecular Virology, University of Ulm, Germany, she studied the role of a newly defined subtype of cells, the innate lymphoid cells type 3 (ILC3) during HIV pathogenesis.

Dr. Smith is now a post-doctoral fellow at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, France, in Dr. Darragh Duffy's lab. She has been awarded with the Pasteur-Roux Cantarini fellowship to study the role of type I and III interferons in the pathogenesis of tuberculosis.