These two women are shattering the glass ceiling for female scientists everywhere. Not only was Theresa Green Reed a physician but she was also the first Black female epidemiologist in the nation. Kizzmekia Corbett is also making history in epidemiology, serving as the head of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
An American physician and epidemiologist, Theresa Green Reed was a woman of many firsts in her field. Born in 1923 in Baltimore, Maryland, Reed grew up to graduate from Meharry Medical College in 1949. She went on to work at the Homer G. Phillips Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, which was one of the leading training hospitals in the country at the time. While working there, she was promoted to assistant clinical director in 1958. She also helped found the Mound City Women Physicians Association in 1963, becoming the organization’s first president, and she was also one of the first members of the St. Louis Medical Society. An important principle of Reed’s practice was rooted in her belief that it was never right to charge a patient for being sick. Reed felt strongly that patients should be entitled to free medical care since they did not ask to be sick.
It wasn’t until Reed got her master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University that she became the first African American woman to work as an epidemiologist. She went to work as a medical officer/Group Leader in the Division of Anti-Infective Drug Products of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research of the Food and Drug Administration. Her main responsibility centered around major prescription drug classes such as the aminoglycosides and quinolones, drug classes which have multiple safety issues from which the public must be protected and which are needed for the treatment of serious and life-threatening infections. Reed’s team made recommendations regarding the FDA’s approval of these products for marketing.
A former Associate Professor of Community Medicine at Howard University’s College of Medicine and life member of the Delta Omega Honorary Public Health Society and The Johns Hopkins University, Reed was the recipient of numerous awards. She invented the term “Pharmacogenetics,” a term widely used in the field today.
Kizzmekia Corbett is also making history as the research fellow and scientific lead for the Coronavirus Vaccines & Immunopathogenesis Team at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Vaccine Research Center (VRC).
Born in 1986 in North Carolina, Corbett graduated from the University of Maryland in 2008 with a degree in biological sciences as well as a secondary major in sociology. She then received her doctorate degree in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Corbett was appointed to the VRC in 2014. Today her work focuses on vaccine development for Coronavirus, however, she has 15 years of expertise studying dengue virus, respiratory syncytial virus and influenza virus. Corbett is an advocate for educating the community about vaccine awareness, STEM education and more.
Her doctoral dissertation focused on studying the epidemiology of dengue, which is the most significant mosquito-borne viral infection of humans. She developed two hypotheses about how pre-existing antibodies and/or the circulating strains of virus influence disease outcome. She also identified the specific properties of human antibodies that appear to protect from severe infection. While Corbett was working on her doctorate degree she spent April and May of 2014 also working as a visiting scholar at Genetech Research Institute in Colombo, Sri Lanka. A new strain of highly pathogenic dengue serotype 1 had been detected in Sri Lanka at the time Corbett traveled to the country. Her time there was spent obtaining and studying blood samples from people exposed to this new strain of dengue.
Shortly after receiving her PhD in Microbiology and Immunology, Dr. Corbett joined NIH as a postdoctoral fellow and an immunologist with the adjacent National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Her initial research with NIH included working on the development of vaccines for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), two types of coronaviruses. It was the incredible work she did with SARS and MERS that Dr. Corbett was chosen to lead the team of scientists who partnered with the biotechnology company Moderna in an effort to develop a promising vaccine. This vaccine, which is currently being administered today, uses a genetic code sequence to prompt the body’s immune system to react when the spike protein is detected, thus blocking the infection process.
Dr. Corbett has written numerous publications on antibodies and infections in scientific journals, such as the Journal of Infectious Diseases (2015), Nature (2016), and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2019).
