Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett

Brooklyn College Academy 2022 Black History Month Honoree

Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett (born in North Carolina on January 26, 1986) is an American viral immunologist. She is the scientific lead for the Coronavirus Vaccines & Immunopathogenesis Team at the National Institutes of Health. She is also an Assistant Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Shutzer Assistant Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

Prior to Harvard for six years she worked at the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health based in Bethesda, Maryland. She earned a PhD in microbiology and immunology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014.

In high school, Corbett realized that she wanted to pursue a scientific career, and as part of an American Chemical Society-sponsored program called Project SEED, spent her summer holiday working in research laboratories. In 2005, she was a summer intern at SUNY Stony Brook University where she studied Yersinia pseudotuberculosis pathogenesis. From 2006 to 2007, she worked as a lab tech at the University of Maryland School of Nursing.

After earning her bachelor's degree, she studied how people produce antibodies in response to dengue fever, and how the genetics of dengue fever impact the severity of a disease. As part of her research for her dissertation, Corbett worked as a visiting scholar at Genetech Research Institute in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

In October 2014, Corbett became a research fellow working as a viral immunologist at the National Institutes of Health. Her research aims to uncover mechanisms of viral pathogenesis and host immunity. She specifically focuses on the development of novel vaccines for coronaviridae.

In response to the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic, the vaccine concept incorporated in mRNA-1273 was designed by Corbett’s team from viral sequence data and rapidly deployed to industry partner Moderna. Dr. Kizzmekia Shanta Corbett is BCA’s 2022 Black History Month Honoree for Science.