Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett

Dr. Kizzmekia “Kizzy” Corbett 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 (VRC). She received a B.S. in Biological Sciences, with a secondary major in Sociology, in 2008 from the University of Maryland – Baltimore County, where she was a Meyerhoff Scholar and an NIH undergraduate scholar. She then enrolled at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she obtained her Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology in 2014. Kizzy, as she likes to be called, is one of the key scientists behind the Moderna coronavirus vaccine. She is a Black woman who has been an important voice around many aspects of the vaccine. Her interest in science started from an early age, but she never knew the difference she would make to impact the world.