Kizzmekia S. Corbett, Ph.D., a National Institutes of Health researcher whose work contributed to the development of an effective COVID-19 vaccine, will lead an online seminar titled “The Race to the Vaccine” April 7 at 4 p.m.
Corbett is a senior research fellow and scientific lead with the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and National Institutes of Health. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the United States, called Corbett “an African American scientist who is right at the forefront of the development of the vaccine."
Corbett worked with Moderna, the pharmaceutical company that developed one of the two mRNA vaccines that has shown to be more than 90% effective. She will appear online for the seminar sponsored by the Biological and Biomedical Sciences Department at North Carolina Central University. Co-host is Bowie State University.
As a high school student in Hillsborough, N.C., she was selected to participate in a program for gifted minority students that allowed her to study chemistry in labs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she earned her Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology.
Her work with viral pathogens began when she joined the NIH's Vaccine Research Center as a postdoctoral fellow in 2014. Her work has been focused on the development of vaccines for novel coronaviruses, including severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) as well as COVID-19.
Please register here: https://bit.ly/3c2J5cw.
The discussion will also broadcast on NCCU’s Facebook and YouTube channels.
For more information about “The Race to the Vaccine” seminar featuring Dr. Kizzmekia S. Corbett, please contact Dr. Vijay Sivaraman at [email protected].
