Who Is Kizzmekia Corbett? Vaccine Researcher Named On TIME's Heroes Of 2021 List

Who is Kizzmekia Corbett: TIME magazine released its Heroes of 2021 list Monday, honouring researchers instrumental in studies and development of the COVID-19 vaccines that have largely become the world's sole hope for battling the pandemic. Among those recognised as 'The Miracle Workers' is Kizzmekia Corbett, the American immunologist who led a team behind the Moderna vaccine.

The 35-year-old is a professor at Harvard University and has been lauded by top medical authorities like Dr Anthony Fauci, who wrote her profile for the TIME100 Next list for 2021, which too honoured her. Fauci noted that "her work will have a substantial impact on ending the worst respiratory-disease pandemic in more than 100 years."

Corbett, a PhD graduate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the scientific lead of the Vaccine Research Center (VRC)'s Coronavirus Vaccines & Immunopathogenesis Team that partnered with pharma company Moderna to develop an mRNA vaccine.

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As explained by Fauci, Corbett's years of research on coronavirus biology was key to the research around spike proteins on the surface of the virus being targets for vaccines. Read more here.

The work by Corbett, along with that of researchers Barney Graham, Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman, as detailed by TIME on their heroes list, will go beyond just the COVID-19 pandemic and has set the foundational stone for further research into health and immunology against the context of other diseases too.

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"If we as scientists learn how to make a vaccine for a cousin in a viral family, and one of those cousins decides to make a pandemic, then we’ll be ready because we can apply the knowledge from one virus and vaccine to another in a plug-and-play way," Corbett tells TIME.

Kariko, the other woman on the heroes list which has an equal ratio of men to women, is a Hungarian biochemist with over three decades of research experience in the field of vaccines. Her name has been associated with both Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic.