Kizzmekia Corbett unveiled the science of the Covid vaccine

Transforming Spaces is a series about women driving change in sometimes unexpected places.

Kizzmekia Corbett had returned home to North Carolina for the holidays in 2019 when headlines began to hit the headlines: a strange pneumonia-like illness was making dozens of sick people in China.

By the first week of January 2020, the number of infected people in China had soared into the hundreds, and Dr. Corbett, a viral immunologist, was back in her office at the National Institutes of Health, where she served as a senior researcher at the Center for Vaccine Research at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. And that's when the news was confirmed: the mystery disease was a new coronavirus, exactly the category of infection she had been probing for the past five years in an effort to develop a vaccine.

< p class="css- at9mc1 evys1bk0">Coronaviruses can cause all kinds of illnesses, from the common cold to more debilitating illnesses like MERS and SARS. Novel coronaviruses are new strains that are identified for the first time in humans. And when it came to the race for a Covid-19 vaccine, Dr. Corbett, who was part of important work on other coronavirus outbreaks, was at the forefront.

Next month will mark the third anniversary of the declaration of a Covid-19 pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020. But during these difficult first months of 2020, Dr. Corbett helped lead a team of scientists who contributed to one of the most amazing achievements in the history of vaccination: a highly effective, easy-to-manufacture vaccine against Covid-19, delivered and cleared in less one year.

On Jan. February 6, 2020, this goal began to take on new urgency. As the number of sick people in China began to climb, Dr. Corbett reunited with her supervisor, Dr. Barney Graham, deputy director of the Center for Vaccine Research and head of the Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory. Both noted that this new disease has uncanny similarities to SARS and MERS, which each killed hundreds of people. Dr. Corbett's work, and the work of his entire team, suddenly had urgent implications.

“At the time, we had no idea that this would become a global pandemic," she said. "So what I felt was the excitement of being able to prove myself and prove my work to the world."

Dr. Corbett, 37, was used to having to prove himself. As a black woman in science, she is used to asserting her worth in rooms full of white men. At the start of 2020, she had been at the National Institutes of Health for five years and had already published groundbreaking research on the structure of other coronaviruses and how the viruses' spike proteins – which form a distinctive crown shape at the surface of the virus and cling to healthy cells in the body - act as a gateway to infection. This research was part of the foundation, laid by scientists including Dr Graham, Katalin Kariko and Dr Drew Weissman of the University of Pennsylvania, for the Covid-19 vaccine, the fastest vaccine ever developed.

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