Kizzmekia Corbett Wins 2022 AAAS Early Career Award for Public Engagement with Science

Kizzmekia Corbett, Assistant Professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, has been awarded the 2022 Early Career Award for Public Engagement with Science from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

The AAAS Early Career Award for Public Engagement with Science recognizes early-career scientists who demonstrate excellence in their public engagement with science activities.

Corbett is a model for how scientists, whose research touches upon important and timely social issues, can engage the public in effective and impactful ways.

As a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institutes of Health, Corbett was instrumental in developing the lifesaving Moderna mRNA vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the infection that leads to COVID-19. She also played a central role in the effort to address vaccine inquisitiveness in communities of color.

Corbett’s public engagement began long before the pandemic. As an undergraduate student, she took part in conversations with Girl Scout troops, church congregations, and on social media, efforts that continued and grew throughout her training and early career.

These experiences prepared her well. Once her research was thrust into the public eye, she was able to engage with the public in responsive and culturally thoughtful ways.

In a letter supporting Corbett’s nomination, former NIH Director Francis Collins highlighted her “marvelous ability to connect with audiences and explain science to the public.” Another nominator, Kafui Dzirasa of Duke University, said Corbett “has likely saved tens of thousands of lives in the last year. When people are asked why they decided to take the vaccine, they say ‘because of Dr. Kizzy.’

It was hardly the first miracle of science to defy belief. A year after the Apollo 11 lunar landing, 30% of Americans surveyed said they did not believe humans had actually walked on the moon. And that was long before social media, the rise of the antivax movement and the many other recent crises of truth that have created barriers to the successful rollout of the vaccines. In the U.S., tens of millions of people refuse to get the shots that are available almost everywhere.

Globally, vaccine hesitancy has combined with inequality and lack of access to create a disastrous state of affairs in poorer parts of the world. COVAX, the multinational program designed to distribute vaccines to low-income countries, is only about a quarter of the way to its original goal of distributing 2 billion doses by the end of 2021. Some of that can be chalked up to wealthier countries hoarding doses, but there are other problems. In some parts of the world, when doses arrive, health workers must overcome significant logistical challenges to get them from airport tarmac to people in hard-to-reach places, and doubts about vaccine safety and efficacy have proved a global phenomenon. That mix of challenges has created severe vaccine inequality, such that only 30% of India is completely protected, and not even 10% of people in Africa have been fully vaccinated. As long as that’s the case, the virus will continue to mutate, giving rise to new variants as it spreads almost unchecked.

“A renaissance in vaccinology” is what University of Pittsburgh Center for Vaccine Research director Paul Duprex calls the tools crafted by Kariko, Weissman, Graham and Corbett and the many scientists who collaborated with them over the years. They represent a novel path out of this pandemic, but also a new approach to quelling future ones. Already, vaccine makers are testing mRNA-based vaccines against influenza, potentially making them more effective, safer and easier to produce.

Thanks to the scientists leading the groundbreaking development and elegant construction of these COVID-19 vaccines, we now have a list of near-infinite possibilities. The vaccines work with a magnificence that only highlights how far science has come—and how far behind society remains in recognizing and accepting what is now possible. Our communications, our politics, our splintered cultures are still snarled in confusion and skepticism, keeping people from getting the shots. Through the harrowing first winter of COVID-19, scientists gifted humanity with the ultimate prize—a weapon to fight the pandemic. It’s now up to humanity to return the favor.