"I like to call it the plug-and-play approach," Corbett, who has a PhD in microbiology and immunology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said in a virtual NIH lecture on Oct. (Spike proteins sit on the surface of coronaviruses and penetrate human cells, causing infection.) She built on her six years of experience studying the spike proteins of other coronaviruses like SARS and MERS in order to design the vaccine within two days of the novel coronavirus being discovered. Kizzmekia Corbett, a 35-year-old viral immunologist and research fellow in the Vaccine Research Center of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is the lead scientist on the team that developed the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine. "The first thing you might want to say to my African-American brothers and sisters is that the vaccine that you're going to be taking was developed by an African-American woman," Fauci said. Anthony Fauci had one very important thing to say about the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine, aka "mRNA-1273," approved by the FDA for emergency use on Dec. Corbett, 35, lead scientist on the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine teamĪt a December event hosted by the National Urban League, Dr. Sometimes people assume you're in the wrong place, and all I can think in the back of my head is, 'No, you're in the wrong place.'"Īs Walgreens' next CEO, Brewer will be responsible for improving the company's revenue amid the pandemic and tasked with overseeing the drugstore chain's Covid-19 vaccine rollout. Sometimes you're mistaken for kitchen help. "You get mistaken as someone who could actually not have that top job. "When you're a Black woman, you get mistaken a lot," she said during a 2018 speech at her alma mater, Spelman College. Prior to working for Walmart, she spent 22 years working for manufacturing company Kimberly-Clark, where she started her career as a scientist and eventually worked her way up to being president of the company's Global Nonwovens Sector in 2004.Īs a longtime executive in corporate America, Brewer has been transparent about the challenges she's faced as one of very few Black women in the C-Suite. Ursula Burns, who served as CEO of Xerox between 20 was the first, and Mary Winston, who served as interim CEO at Bed Bath & Beyond in 2019, was the second.īrewer, who joined Starbucks in 2017 as the company's first Black and first woman COO, previously spent five years serving as the CEO of Sam's Club, which is owned by Walmart.
When she steps into this new role, she will be the only Black woman currently leading a Fortune 500 firm, and just the third Black woman in history to serve as a Fortune 500 CEO. In March, Rosalind Brewer, who currently serves as Starbucks' chief operating officer, will be starting a new position as CEO of drugstore chain Walgreens Boots Alliance. Cory Stieg Rosalind Brewer, 58, Walgreens' next CEO and only Black woman to currently lead a Fortune 500 firm Harris also helped others make history in December when she hired the first all-woman senior staff for the U.S. In 2016, she was elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate for the state of California.
Harris is also a member of the oldest historically Black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.Īnd she was the first Black American to serve as California's Attorney General from 2011 to 2016. Harris is also the first vice president to have graduated from a historically Black college or university (HBCU), Howard University, and credits her "sense of being and meaning" to her time as a student there. "So, I'm thinking about her and about the generations of women - Black women, Asian, White, Latina, and Native American women who throughout our nation's history have paved the way for this moment tonight," she said. in 1958 to study biochemistry.) "But she believed so deeply in an America where a moment like this is possible." "When she came here from India at the age of 19, she maybe didn't quite imagine this moment," Harris said on Nov.