Written by admin• March 18, 2026• 3:13 pm• Icons & Amplifiers, Women Spotlight

Driven to Discover: The Journey of Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett from Dreamer to Vaccine Pioneer

Dr. Kizzmekia “Kizzy” Shanta Corbett-Helaire (née Corbett) was born on January 26, 1986, in Hurdle Mills, North Carolina, and raised in Hillsborough, North Carolina. She grew up in a large, blended family with her mother Rhonda Brooks, stepfather, and numerous step-siblings and foster siblings. Her family recognized her bright and inquisitive mind early on, noting her strong determination and drive. As a child, she famously declared her goal to become the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine, and her mother observed, “When she’s got her mind set on something, it’s set. She can do anything.” Her educational journey began at Oak Lane Elementary School in Roxboro and A.L. Stanback Middle School in Hillsborough, where her fourth-grade teacher Myrtis Bradsher recognized her exceptional talent and encouraged her mother to place her in advanced classes. “I always thought she is going to do something one day. She dotted i’s and crossed t’s. The best in my 30 years of teaching,” Bradsher later recalled. In high school, Corbett participated in Project SEED, an American Chemical Society-sponsored program for gifted minority students, conducting summer research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan Labs with organic chemist James Morkin. She graduated from Orange High School in 2004.

Personal Life and Family

Dr. Corbett married in 2023 and welcomed her first child in 2023. She has shared that 2023 was “a time for me” getting married, having a baby, and officially opening her lab at Harvard after renovations. She is learning to balance productivity with new motherhood, noting that “if any job consistently requires 80 and 90 hours of you, then that means they probably need to hire two people”. She maintains strong connections to her North Carolina roots and her faith, attending online church services with her mother from a church in Texas and planning to visit in person post-pandemic. In her spare time, she enjoys spending quality time with her husband and children, FaceTiming her nieces and nephews, socializing in the Boston performance arts sphere, discovering new underground hip-hop, R&B, and jazz artists, and “having a glass of wine (or two… or three)”.

Undergraduate and Doctoral Training

Corbett earned her B.S. in Biological Sciences with a secondary major in Sociology in 2008 from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where she was a Meyerhoff Scholar and NIH undergraduate scholar. During her undergraduate years, she interned at the NIH’s Vaccine Research Center (VRC) studying host responses to respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) while also serving as a data collection lead for a health disparities project called “Healthy Aging in Neighborhoods of Diversity Across a Lifespan” (HANDLS). She then returned to North Carolina to pursue her doctoral studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-Chapel Hill), where she obtained her Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology in 2014 as a Director’s Scholar. Her dissertation research focused on understanding the role of human antibodies in dengue virus pathogenesis, conducting fieldwork in Sri Lanka under the supervision of Aravinda de Silva. She also completed a visiting scholarship at Genetech Research Institute in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

NIH Vaccine Research Center and Coronavirus Expertise

Corbett joined the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a senior research fellow in the Vaccine Research Center’s Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory, under the direction of Dr. Barney S. Graham In October 2014. She served as the scientific lead for the Coronavirus Vaccines & Immunopathogenesis Team, focusing on developing novel vaccines for coronaviruses including SARS and MERS.

Her early research at NIH was pivotal. She identified a simple way to make coronavirus spike proteins stabilized in a conformation that renders them more immunogenic and manufacturable, collaborating with researchers at Scripps Research Institute and Dartmouth College. She developed methods for rapidly producing antigen proteins that could be modified to match different viruses, as well as methods for delivering genetic instructions via messenger RNA (mRNA) work that would prove directly applicable to COVID-19. She also spent several years working on a universal influenza vaccine, which is slated for Phase 1 clinical trial.

The COVID-19 Vaccine: mRNA-1273 and Record-Breaking Speed

When SARS-CoV-2 emerged in January 2020, Corbett and Graham “dropped everything” and began using their mRNA platform to develop a vaccine. Less than 48 hours after the release of the novel coronavirus’s genome, their team had designed the protein that would become the basis for their candidate COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine concept, mRNA-1273, was designed by Corbett’s NIH team from viral sequence and rapidly deployed to industry partner Moderna, Inc. The first-in-human Phase 1 clinical trial began in an unprecedented 66 days from viral sequence release a record-breaking achievement. The vaccine was later shown to be 94.1% effective in Phase 3 trials and received FDA emergency use authorization on December 18, 2020. Corbett’s patented technology is now used in multiple vaccines worldwide, including Moderna’s, Pfizer’s, Novavax’s, and Johnson & Johnson’s.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, then director of NIAID, famously stated: “The vaccine that you’re going to be taking was developed by an African American woman. And that is just a fact.” He also called her “a rising star” and noted that her “work will have a substantial impact on ending the worst respiratory-disease pandemic in more than 100 years”.

Visibility, Advocacy and Combating Vaccine Hesitancy

Corbett first made national headlines on March 3, 2020, when she participated in a team briefing with then-President Donald Trump at the NIH. She later explained: “I felt like it was necessary to be seen and to not be a hidden figure so to speak… I felt that it was important to do that because the level of visibility that it would have to younger scientists and also to people of color who have often worked behind the scenes and essentially done the dirty work for these large efforts toward a vaccine.” President Joe Biden also visited her lab in February 2021.

Beyond her scientific work, Corbett has been a powerful advocate for vaccine education and combating vaccine hesitancy, particularly in Black and marginalized communities. She has stated: “Vaccines have the potential to be the equalizer of health disparities, especially around infectious diseases. I could never sleep at night if I developed anything if any product of my science came out and it did not equally benefit the people that look like me. Period.” She has personally accompanied individuals to get vaccinated after addressing their concerns at MSNBC town halls and worked to ensure people of color were included in clinical trials in numbers reflective of their proportion of the general population.

Harvard University and Current Research

Corbett joined the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health as the Melvin J. and Geraldine L. Glimcher Assistant Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases and Shutzer Assistant Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute In June 2021. She is also an Associate Member of the Phillip T. and Susan M. Ragon Institute and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Freeman Hrabowski Scholar (selected in 2023). The Corbett Lab at Harvard focuses on pandemic preparedness through understanding host immune responses to coronaviruses and other emerging and re-emerging viruses. Her current research aims to develop universal coronavirus vaccines that protect against multiple coronavirus types using two simultaneous approaches: designing spike-based vaccine antigens to target cross-reactive areas, and engineering nanoparticles to display multiple vaccine antigens. She also continues work on universal influenza vaccine concepts and novel therapeutic antibodies.

In January 2025, Corbett emphasized that preparing for the next pandemic requires more funding, better communication from public health leaders, and stronger partnerships among government agencies, business, and academia. She noted there are 26 viral families with the ability to infect humans that could cause pandemics, and for many of these, “we have far less knowledge and understanding than we did of coronaviruses before the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Major Awards and Recognition

Dr. Corbett-Helaire has received numerous prestigious honors for her scientific contributions: