The Her Edit

Black History Month · Then & Now

A scientist from rural North Carolina who spent years preparing for a moment no one could predict. A reflection on the quiet work that comes before the breakthrough.

We tend to notice breakthroughs. We rarely notice the years that come before them.

The late nights. The experiments that don’t work. The steady, unglamorous work of preparing for something that might never come. And then, suddenly, the world needs exactly what you’ve spent your life becoming ready to give.

This is Dr Kizzmekia Corbett-Helaire’s story.

A girl in North Carolina

Kizzmekia was born in 1986 in Hurdle Mills, North Carolina, and grew up in nearby Hillsborough in a large blended family. Her teachers noticed early how bright and curious she was. With their encouragement, she took part in programmes that placed young people in real laboratories — and she fell in love with research.

She went on to study biological sciences and sociology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, as part of a scholarship programme designed to support students from underrepresented backgrounds in science. She then earned her PhD in microbiology and immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

I find it meaningful that she studied sociology alongside science. It hints at something that runs through her whole career: she has never separated the science from the people it’s for.

Preparing for the unknown

In 2014, Kizzmekia joined the Vaccine Research Center at the US National Institutes of Health. Her work focused on coronaviruses — a family of viruses that, at the time, most people had never heard of.

For years, she and her colleagues studied how to stabilise the “spike” protein that coronaviruses use to enter our cells. It was careful, patient, detailed work. The kind that rarely makes headlines.

And then, in early 2020, a new coronavirus began to spread across the world.

Sixty-six days

Because of the years of groundwork Kizzmekia and her team had already laid, they were able to move remarkably quickly. Working with Moderna, they helped develop the vaccine that entered its first clinical trial just sixty-six days after the virus’s genetic sequence was released.

That speed wasn’t luck. It was the fruit of years of quiet preparation meeting a moment of urgent need.

Some of the most important work in the world looks like patience, until the day it looks like a miracle.

Building trust

What I find especially moving is what Kizzmekia did alongside the lab work. Many Black communities, understandably, carried deep mistrust of medical institutions, rooted in a long history of harm. Rather than dismissing those fears, Kizzmekia met them with honesty and care. She spoke in churches, community forums and on social media, explaining the science clearly and warmly, and listening as much as she spoke.

It was a beautiful example of expertise offered with humility — not “trust me because I know,” but “let me walk you through it, because you deserve to understand.”

In 2021, she joined the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she now leads her own lab researching vaccines and the immune system. In 2026, she was named a TED Fellow.

What I carry from her story

I’ve come to realise how often we underestimate our preparation seasons. The years where it feels like nothing is happening. The quiet learning, the patient practice, the work no one applauds.

Kizzmekia’s story is a gentle reminder that those seasons matter. That the work you’re doing now, unseen, may be exactly what’s needed later — in ways you can’t yet imagine.

And perhaps, too, that the greatest expertise is the kind that stays close to people.

Softly, Fiona x.