Meet the 34-Year-Old Scientist Leading the Charge on COVID-19 Vaccine Trials

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A team of National Institute of Health scientists are leading the charge to finding a vaccine for COVID-19.

Scientist behind COVID-19 vaccine

As coronavirus continues to spread rapidly throughout the United States, a group of scientists led by Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett is working around the clock toward developing a life-saving vaccine.

Corbett, 34, is a research fellow at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where she and her team have already begun first-stage clinical trials of a vaccine to fight against COVID-19, according to The New York Times.

Clinical trials 

The trials began in Seattle in March. According to Dr. Anthony Fauci, it happened in “record speed” taking about two months, a much faster turnaround than the 20 months it took get a SARS vaccine to trial in 2003, NBC News reported.

If successful, the vaccine could reportedly be ready for patients by early to mid-2021.

“There was, and is, already a fair amount of pressure. A lot of people are banking on us or feel that we have a product that could, at least, be part of the answer this world needs,” Corbett told NBC News. “And, well, whew, just saying that out loud is not easy.”

COVID-19 vaccine scientist is Black excellence 

Corbett earned a degree in biology and sociology at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She then obtained a doctorate from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2014, and later joined the NIH’s Vaccine Research Center as a postdoctoral fellow that same year.

Corbett, a North Carolina native, has been working around the clock, seven-day weeks, and getting just three to four hours of sleep each night, according to NBC News.

“At some point, you have to decide how much to care,” she said. “You understand that your work will have to be mighty so that it can do your speaking.”

Corbett’s team’s COVID-19 clinical trials are the first of their kind. According vto NBC, the team will have to put the vaccine through three different trials to verify its safety and effectiveness before it can be available at doctor’s offices.