Professor Valérie Verhasselt has been holding the Larsson-Rosenquist Chair in Human Lactology at the University of Western Australia since August 2017. Her translational research is aimed at understanding how maternal milk impacts on immune development, education and long term homeostasis. A major objective guiding her work is the identification of factors which could endow breastfeeding with the capacity to prevent allergic and metabolic disease as potently as it does for infectious disease. Valérie Verhasselt trained at the University of Medicine of Brussels (ULB, Belgium) where she obtained the diploma of Medical Doctor (1992), Specialist in Internal Medicine (2000) and a PhD in Immunology (1999). In 2004, she moved to France (Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis) and developed the concept of breastfeeding induced tolerance for prevention of allergy. She obtained a tenured researcher position at INSERM in 2008 and created Immune Tolerance team in 2012 in Nice (France). In 2017, she was granted the first Chair in Human Lactology at UWA. Her research has been published in prestigious reviews such as Nature Medicine, Gut, Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Lancet Infectious Disease. The French Académie Nationale de Médecine (2012) and Académie des Sciences (2008) have acknowledged her major contribution in the field of prevention of allergy through maternal milk.