ACTERIA Early Career Prize in Allergology
Mariem Radhouani
Doctoral Prize in Allergology: Mariem RADHOUANI, BIS, for her PhD thesis on the impact of bacterial skin infection on allergic asthma.
Mariem Radhouani, 35, graduated as a Doctor in Veterinary Medicine from the National School of Veterinary Medicine of Sidi Thabet (Tunisia) before obtaining a Master's degree in Infectiology and Immunology from the University of Tours (France). In 2025, she completed her PhD in Immunology at the Medical University of Vienna and CeMM – Research Center for Molecular Medicine (Austria) under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Philipp Starkl, with initial co-supervision by Prof. Sylvia Knapp. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratories of Prof. Bart Lambrecht and Prof. Hamida Hammad at the VIB-UGent Center for Inflammation Research (Belgium).
During her PhD, Mariem investigated how bacterial skin infections shape long-term susceptibility to allergic diseases. She demonstrated that a localized Staphylococcus aureus skin infection induces persistent reprogramming of bone marrow eosinophil progenitors, leading to innate immune memory in eosinophils. This long-term adaptation enhanced eosinophil inflammatory responses and promoted allergic airway inflammation after the infection had resolved, revealing a previously unrecognized mechanism linking bacterial infections to allergy. She further identified IL-33 and complement component C5a as key regulators of eosinophil expansion and recruitment, while trained eosinophils exhibited distinct chromatin accessibility, metabolic and transcriptional profiles, providing molecular evidence of stable functional reprogramming.
Her work provided the first demonstration that eosinophils can develop innate immune memory, expanding the concept of trained immunity. These findings were published in Science Immunology, alongside additional publications in leading immunology and allergy journals. In recognition of her doctoral research, she received the 2025 Clemens von Pirquet Prize from the Austrian Society for Allergology and Immunology (ÖGAI).
Mariem is currently investigating how maternal immunity shapes organ development and susceptibility to allergic disease in offspring at the VIB-UGent Center for Inflammation Research. She was recently awarded the prestigious EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue this research.
