Ilhem Messaoudi, Ph.D.
- Acting Vice President for Research
Dr. Ilhem Messaoudi was appointed Acting Vice President for Research at the University of Kentucky in September 2024.
As Acting Vice President for Research, she leads the university’s research enterprise, overseeing the development of research proposals, administration of grants and contracts, human subjects protection, 14 multidisciplinary research centers and institutes, and eight service core facilities. She provides leadership for university’s eight Research Priority Areas focused on addressing Kentucky’s most pressing challenges.
Dr. Messaoudi serves as principal investigator on several, multi-million-dollar federal grants, with research focusing on the dysregulation of immunity by substance use disorder, age and obesity. Her research has expanded to maternal health, fetal development and the role of the immune system in childhood development. She has published more than 150 scholarly articles and is the recipient of several national research awards.
Joining the faculty at the University of Kentucky in 2021, Dr. Messaoudi is currently a professor and chair in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics in the College of Medicine. She is leading the renovation of the university’s BSL-3 facility, that allows UK researchers to safely study airborne infectious agents. She leads the Consortium for Understanding and Reducing Infectious Diseases in Kentucky (CURE-KY) to combat the threat of infectious diseases through transdisciplinary research. She has a leadership role on the Kentucky Maternal Morbidity and Mortality Task Force, a group collecting data, expanding telehealth, training providers on intimate partner violence, and focusing other statewide collaborations to target obstetrical causes and social determinants associated with maternal death.
Dr. Messaoudi earned a Bachelor of Science in biochemistry from Lafayette College in Pennsylvania and Ph.D. in immunology from Cornell University and Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s joint Immunology Program. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the Vaccine & Gene Therapy Institute at Oregon Health & Science University. She currently serves on the Board of Scientific Counselors for the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and is a Fellow at the American Academy of Microbiology.