Black Inventions in Modern Medicine

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Black Inventors in Modern Medicine

Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, a viral immunologist and senior research fellow at the National Institutes of Health, was working on the development of a vaccine against novel coronaviruses when the news of a new pneumonialike illness in China broke out in early January 2020. It was later confirmed to be a novel coronavirus, Covid-19. Dr. Corbett, who has a sharp sense of humor and an easygoing style, grew up in Hillsborough, N.C., and earned her Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014. As a Black woman in science, she was used to proving herself in a field dominated by white men. Her research on coronaviruses and their spike proteins formed the foundation for the rapid development of the Covid-19 vaccine by Moderna and Pfizer. She worked with Dr. Barney Graham and others to quickly prepare a modified sequence for a vaccine and by December 2020, it was authorized for emergency use by the FDA. Despite the rapidly climbing death toll, she and her team were primarily focused on proving their earlier research could be widely applied and were not racing against the pandemic, but racing themselves.

Dr. Corbett reviews data with Dr. Christian Dzuvor, a postdoctoral fellow, in her Harvard office.

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Mechanical/Solar Engineer, Prof. Oku Singer

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