To date, more than 400,000 covid-19-related deaths have been reported in the United States. But throughout 2020, Dr. Kizzmekia "Kizzy" Corbett was one of the scientists focused on a search for a COVID-19 vaccine.
In December, Good Morning America (GMA) broadcast Dr. Anthony Fauci's praise of Corbett. Asked to talk about the input of Black scientists in the vaccine process, this is what Fauci said at a National Urban League summit held to encourage people of color people to get vaccinated.
"The very vaccine that's one of the two that has absolutely exquisite levels... that vaccine was actually developed in my institute's vaccine research center by a team of scientists led by Dr. Barney Graham and his close colleague, Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, or Kizzy Corbett," Fauci told the National Urban League. "Kizzy is an African American scientist who is right at the forefront of the development of the vaccine."
In March 2020, the world caught its first glimpse of Dr. Corbett in a biological lab at the National Institutes of Health in a White House photo
"This person who looks like you has been working on this for several years and I also wanted it to be visible because I wanted people to understand that I stood by the work that I'd done for so long as well," she added.
Corbett is part of a team at NIH that worked with Moderna. Recently, the pharmaceutical company announced that the Moderna COVID‑19 Vaccine has been authorized for emergency use by the FDA, under an Emergency Use Authorization, to prevent Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID‑19) for use in individuals 18 years of age and older.
"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," Corbett said.
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Kizzmekia S. Corbett, Ph.D. is a research fellow and the scientific lead for the Coronavirus Vaccines & Immunopathogenesis Team at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Vaccine Research Center.
As a viral immunologist, Dr. Corbett uses her expertise to propel novel vaccine development for pandemic preparedness.
She received a bachelor's degree in Biological Sciences, with a major in sociology, in 2008 from the University of Maryland – Baltimore County, where she was a Meyerhoff Scholar and an NIH undergraduate scholar. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014.
That same year, she was appointed to the Vaccine Research Center (VRC), with work focused on developing novel coronavirus vaccines, including mRNA-1273, a leading candidate vaccine against the virus that causes COVID-19.
In response to the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic, the vaccine concept incorporated in mRNA-1273 was designed by Dr. Corbett’s team from viral sequence data and rapidly deployed to an industry partner, Moderna, Inc., for U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved Phase 1 clinical trial, which unprecedently began only 66 days from the viral sequence release.
In all, she has 15 years of expertise studying the dengue virus, respiratory syncytial virus, influenza virus, and coronaviruses.
Along with her research activities, Dr. Corbett is an active member of the NIH Fellows Committee and an avid advocator of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education and vaccine awareness in the community.
Combining her research goals with her knack for mentoring, Dr. Corbett aims to become an independent principal investigator.
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