On this remaining day of Girls's Historical past Month, CBS Information' chief medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook caught up with a medical researcher who has already made her personal mark on historical past. Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett is being celebrated for main a crew on the Nationwide Institutes of Well being that helped develop Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine.
"It is Girls's Historical past Month, and you have actually made historical past no matter gender," Dr. LaPook mentioned to Dr. Corbett.
"I have not been capable of take pleasure in it, actually," she responded. "There's nonetheless a lot work to be performed, a lot science to be performed, that it is onerous to essentially soak in."
Now 36, Dr. Corbett is a researcher with a PhD in microbiology and immunology. She works as an assistant professor at Harvard T.H. Chan College of Public Well being and because the Shutzer assistant professor on the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She first caught the analysis bug as a teen, when she labored in a lab on the College of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
"The primary scientist of shade that I met was once I was 16, and I prefer to say that he truly might be the explanation why I'm a scientist," she advised Dr. LaPook. "That illustration that I noticed in him once I went to my first internship each single day, it made me notice that I may do it, that it was a chance for somebody like me who was a primary technology, 4 12 months school graduate."
As a lady of shade within the science area, she acknowledged that she is a task mannequin to some kids.
"Somebody offered about me throughout Black Historical past Month, truly in my niece's classroom, and she or he mentioned, 'that is my aunt' and nobody believed her, so I needed to drop into her classroom," Dr. Corbett mentioned. "These are among the most refreshing moments to have youngsters acknowledge, and I, they consider me as a hero, so to talk."
"And a task mannequin, proper?" Dr. LaPook responded.
"And a task mannequin," she replied.