Akiko Iwasaki

Akiko Iwasaki was born and raised in Iga, Japan. She was inspired early by her parents: her father was a physicist and her mother worked at a media company. Despite being a temporary worker there for many years, her mother had to fight to gain recognition as a full employee at a time when women were discouraged from working. As Iwasaki told the Yale Alumni Magazine, she learned from her mother’s struggle that “you can really stand up for yourself and for others, to make the workplace a better place.”

Iwasaki left Japan as a teenager to finish high school in Canada and received her bachelor’s degree and PhD from the University of Toronto. Like her father, she had been enamored with mathematics and physics, but in time her focus shifted to immunology, which became her doctoral focus. Subsequently, she worked at the U.S. National Institutes of Health as a postdoctoral fellow before starting her own lab at Yale University. She was awarded a Sterling Professorship, Yale’s highest academic honor for a professor, and is an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Iwasaki’s research focuses on the mechanisms of immune defense against viruses that infect the host via mucous membranes, as well as related vaccine strategies. She is a colead investigator of the Yale COVID-19 Recovery Study. In 2024 Iwasaki was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. Anthony Fauci, former director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, praised Iwasaki for her work “delineating the mechanisms of how [the immune system] reacts to COVID-19” and for “her leadership and her compassion . . . championing women and people of color in science.”