An African American woman, Kizzmekia Corbett has been named a part of the team instrumental in developing a COVID-19 vaccine by Dr. Anthony Fauci, a US top infectious disease expert.
Corbett is an expert on the front lines of the global race for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine and someone who will go down in history as one of the key players in developing the science that could end the pandemic. She is one of the National Institutes of Health’s leading scientists behind the government’s search for vaccines.
34-year-old Corbett is part of a team at NIH that worked with Moderna, the pharmaceutical company that developed one of the two mRNA vaccines that have shown to be more than 90% effective.
Moderna’s vaccine is expected to receive emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration this month.
The other mRNA vaccine, developed by Pfizer, won emergency use authorization from the FDA on Friday.
As of now, the coronavirus has killed nearly 300,000 people and infected more than 15 million people in the U.S
Even before Corbett took on one of the most challenging tasks of her professional career, she was a force to be reckoned with. As a student, she was selected to participate in Project SEED, a program for gifted minority students that allowed her to study chemistry in labs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and eventually landed a full ride to the University of Maryland Baltimore County.
Corbett spent her summers at laboratories and earned a summer internship at the NIH, the very place where she would be instrumental in developing a vaccine for the coronavirus.
After graduating, Corbett enrolled in a doctorate program at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she worked as a research assistant studying virus infections and eventually received a PhD in microbiology and immunology, according to her LinkedIn page.
Her work with such pathogens began when she joined the NIH’s Vaccine Research Center as a postdoctoral fellow in 2014.
She told ABC News that she could have never anticipated what she has since been able to accomplish on Fauci’s team.
“The reason that I started to work in coronavirus was not to ever develop a vaccine, but really to have such a strong understanding in vaccine immune responses that we could potentially develop one,” she said.
This year, Corbett said, she has had to put her last six years of training to work.
In early January, “with the knowledge that there was a respiratory outbreak in the Wuhan district of China, [Dr. Barney Graham] started sending emails essentially telling me and the team to buckle up,” Corbett said.
Early in the pandemic, when Fauci predicted the world might see an effective vaccine in about a year, Corbett said she knew it was possible
“It was certainly doable if all the things and all the pieces of the puzzle came together,” she said.
Corbett first made headlines on March 3 as part of a team of scientists who spoke with President Donald Trump at the NIH.