COVID-19 vaccine lead Kizzmekia Corbett - Not your average scientist

April 16, 2020 11:50 AM

After years studying coronaviruses and dengue fever, Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett is leading the research team that launched the earliest clinical trials toward a COVID-19 vaccine. Janell Ross reports on Dr. Corbett for NBC News.

In addition to research, Dr. Corbett invests much of her time bringing STEM awareness to youth in local underserved communities through mentorship and volunteering.

NIH Lab Races To Create Coronavirus Vaccine In Record Time, NPR's Morning Edition
Meet the 'Outstanding' 34-Year-Old Scientist Leading the Charge on Coronavirus Vaccine Trials, People
Soon You’ll Have a Black Woman to Thank for the COVID-19 Vaccine at AfroTech
Black woman immunologist leads charge to develop COVID-19 vaccine at The Grio

Kizzmekia Corbett at Wikipedia
Kizzmekia S. Corbett citations on Google Scholar
Kizzmekia S Corbett entries at ResearchGate
Women of Power profile at Black Enterprise
Kizzmekia Shanta Corbett bio at BlackPast
World, Meet Kizzmekia Corbett at The Science Times

posted by kristi (12 comments total)

The hero we need, not the hero we deserve.
posted by biogeo at 12:27 PM on April 16, 2020 [9 favorites]

The work she is doing is amazing and she sounds like a cool person but I really hate this lazy "haha scientists are nerds" media shit. She sounds exactly like most of the scientists I work with: bright, ambitious, personable and with a strong desire to make the world a better place because she knows she can do it.
posted by fshgrl at 1:18 PM on April 16, 2020 [42 favorites]

She mentions that 190 Covid-19 related research papers were release in just. One. Day. Fuck.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 2:51 PM on April 16, 2020 [2 favorites]

I agree with fshgrl. My husband is a cloud physicist and certainly not a nerd. He's all the things you mention, and a devoted husband and father of four, loving grandfather of five. He entered his profession to " make a contribution," as he puts it.
posted by ragtimepiano at 2:55 PM on April 16, 2020 [3 favorites]

She mentions that 190 Covid-19 related research papers were release in just. One. Day. Fuck.

The interns would need interns at that point.

I was talking to a researcher late last week who said the first proper US pathology reports had just come out. I found that amazing, kind of makes you realize how much of the published work so far is lab-based.
posted by fshgrl at 5:52 PM on April 16, 2020

A primer on Coronavirus Vaccine Prospects as of 15 April, by Derek Lowe
posted by lalochezia at 6:08 PM on April 16, 2020 [6 favorites]

I have hope because on a planetary scale, our best people are on it. It's not a small thing.

I mean, I get that some of our.... other... people are on it, too.

But when it comes to treating the sick, and working on a vaccine, and treatments to save lives, there is huge, genuine effort to among the best minds on earth to crack this thing.

This is a big, nasty problem, but we'll get there.
posted by thenormshow at 6:21 PM on April 16, 2020 [3 favorites]

Thanks for this post.
posted by medusa at 7:11 PM on April 16, 2020 [2 favorites]

I love that she's wicked smart and working incredibly hard on a rapid response vaccine. I hate that she also has to deal with bigots and "remember all the birthdays" as well. Because we all know that she's doing the "save the human race" labor, which would be Plenty, but because she's a woman, she also has to do emotional labor. And because she's a black woman, she gets extra "go back to McDonald's" (WTF) bigotry for it.

As stated above, not at all the hero we deserve, but so glad she's here. Like a bazillion other heroes helping out there making things better right now.
posted by ldthomps at 7:48 PM on April 16, 2020 [4 favorites]

She mentions that 190 Covid-19 related research papers were release in just. One. Day.

Somewhere out there, there's a wall that's getting very tired of seeing lots of unsticky things thrown at it.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 8:56 PM on April 16, 2020 [3 favorites]

I've been following Dr. Corbett on twitter for a while. She is great! I really appreciated the discussion of her background and the Meyerhoff scholarship at UMBC. It is a great antidote to all the "too many people are going to college" and "not everybody is college material" bullshit.

"When I think about Kizzy, I'm not at all surprised she's one of the scientists on the edge of a vaccine," Harmon said. "Not one bit. What I am reminded of is that there is such ability, untapped, unrecognized and un-nurtured among students, all our students, particularly among our underrepresented minority students. And if we accept that as normal, you really have to wonder what serious challenges we leave unsolved."

This is why I will go upstairs in a few minutes and talk about animal evolution into my computer while some students listen now and others come home from their job at the grocery store or get a break from attempted homeschooling their kids and listen to the recording later. We don't know who will solve the next terrifying problem we face. So I better keep doing a good job doing emergency remote teaching during the pandemic, just in case the person who could solve the next problem used to sit in my classroom and now just logs into my LMS.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:08 AM on April 17, 2020 [23 favorites]

This is why I will go upstairs in a few minutes and talk about animal evolution into my computer while some students listen now and others come home from their job at the grocery store or get a break from attempted homeschooling their kids and listen to the recording later. We don't know who will solve the next terrifying problem we face. So I better keep doing a good job doing emergency remote teaching during the pandemic, just in case the person who could solve the next problem used to sit in my classroom and now just logs into my LMS.

It's also why it's so frustrating to see the anti-intellectualism in the Middle East, US and now some of SE Asia and Europe too the past decade or so. We wasted so much potential in the past with bias and prejudice and once we sort of start to begin to get past that as a society and begin to provide opportunities to women and minority cultures (no matter where you live there are minority cultures in your society) which hugely increases our capacity to create good things, a chunk of assholes decide they hate smart people who have good and novel ideas and want to share them with the world for free. Researchers like Dr Corbett are why we have nice things and most of us ask little in return, the least of anyone in the STEM community and far less than your average person. Many of my peers cannot even afford to have children, for pete's sake.

Humans are really not going to make it as a species, I don't think.
posted by fshgrl at 5:18 PM on April 17, 2020 [2 favorites]