Career advice from my father: "Go where you are loved".

I am honored to receive the E. E. Just Award. I applaud ASCB's commitment to recognizing the contributions of researchers from historically excluded racial and ethnic groups and appreciate my inclusion on a long list of accomplished peers. I also thank Barney Graham, who not only had a profound impact on my own career, but has a deep commitment to advancing unrepresented groups in the sciences. Finally, I thank my parents, for encouraging me to use my scholarship to excite change, for reminding me that anything is possible, and for advising me with tenderness along the way. As I recently went through a career transition, I found myself returning to much of my father's sage advice. In this essay, I discuss one important piece of advice that I received from my father in hopes that it will help others navigate their own career choices.

Kizzmekia S. Corbett

When people ask for career advice, they are often looking for something very specific. Where should they work? How can they get to the next level? What should they study? Careers, particularly those in science, can be difficult to navigate. The trajectory is tediously long, but at each step, all of the small specific questions we ask ourselves boil down to one very simple question: “Where should I take my life next?”

Even when I, as an young aspiring academic, was faced with the decision on where to go for college, that question loomed. It was April 14, 2004, the day before the deadline to decide between multiple universities and scholarship programs. My father, noticing my anxiety, said: “Go where you are loved.” It was that simple. Without much extra thought about the coursework, the professors, and other details of each prospective university, it was then very clear to me where I should take my life next.

I was raised in a family of seven children with mixed backgrounds—a blended household of foster children, adopted children, step-siblings, and half-siblings. The experience gave me an innate appreciation for the value of diverse life experiences and perspectives. Though I was one of many, my parents were committed to helping each of us understand our unique strengths, and ensuring that we used them effectively to make the world a better place. My parents saw, through their individualized love for each of us, the potential in each of us. They saw the burgeoning engineer in my innovative little sister. They saw the handiness of my little brother, who is now a contractor. In me, they saw a scholar. My parents recognized my academic potential from an early age and told me that if I was going to have a job during high school summers, it should have a scholastic angle. At their encouragement, I interned in a local university’s organic chemistry laboratory. It was a decision that would end up setting the course for my current career (Corbett, 2020).

After graduating from high school, I knew I wanted to pursue my passion for science. So, I followed my father’s advice and went where I was loved—the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. I was confident that it was a school that would not only appreciate me as I was, but support me in becoming who I was meant to be. That was evident from talking to current students, spending a weekend on campus, and, importantly, seeing firsthand the university president, Freeman Hrabowski’s, undying passion for the career and personal development of students like me—from backgrounds like mine with aspirations like mine to, as I put it then, “win a Nobel Prize”(Hansen, 2021).

“Go where you are loved” is a strategy that has since guided my career: from my choice of undergrad institution to where I landed for graduate school to my postdoc fellowship at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to me joining the faculty of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.

Early on in my studies, I became interested in viral immunology and in particular how it pertains to vaccine development. At the time, I was a sociology and biology double-major conducting health disparity research with one of my sociology professors and basic vaccinology research at the NIH Vaccine Research Center (VRC). During the course of my work, I was exposed to the concept of bench-to-bedside research as well as the societal impacts on health outcomes. Just like that, my two interests—advancing science and alleviating health disparities—came together in an inspiring way. It became clear that vaccines had the potential to level the playing field in many critical areas of public health, especially those related to infectious diseases. This realization cemented my career aspirations and set me on the path I’m on today.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I had an opportunity that researchers dream about: to put my life’s work into practice, create an immediate impact, and save lives around the world. It was a great privilege and an even greater responsibility. Building on existing knowledge of optimally immunogenic coronavirus spike protein antigens, our team partnered with Moderna to design and develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus—the mRNA-1273 vaccine. I will never forget the moment when the efficacy results came in. It was a surreal feeling to realize we had built something of such imminent global importance. It was gratifying to see the fruition of our years of research come together in the name of “pandemic preparedness” (Corbett ; Graham and Corbett, 2020).

The part of the story that goes untold is that, before the pandemic, I was already interviewing for faculty positions. I’d landed an offer, but I postponed acceptance of it when I learned of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China. I wanted to see our vaccine development through to clinical trials, and more than that, I always aspired to be a principal investigator at the VRC. I had something to prove. It goes without saying that the work we did in the past year brought to the table job offers of my wildest dreams. I wrote manuscripts (Corbett , b, 2021a, b), and I wrote faculty offer rebuttals. I met with my team, and I met with department chairs. I got fully vaccinated, masked up, and flew out to visit mostly deserted campuses to get a feel for the atmospheres.

And, I called my dad.

He said it again, but this time in a peer-to-peer tone, stern and exact…

“Go where you will be loved.”

In evaluating my options, it was important that the institution’s vision aligned with my own. It was important that the institution saw me clearly in that vision not for who I was at the onset of 2020, but for who I’d become since; I’d changed. Science had changed. I believe my dad’s addition of “ will be” was his acknowledgment of just that. Beyond designing a vaccine, doing preclinical studies that led to its rapid clinical development, and publishing in top-tier journals, I’d now not only been exposed to the delicate interface of science and public health like I was in my tender undergraduate years… I’d been thrust into it.

My social media messages were afire daily with lay people begging me to explain vaccine science. I was speaking, albeit virtually, at churches and community organizations more than I was speaking at universities. The glory of having “saved the world” was met with the reality of a world of misunderstanding. The part of pandemic preparedness (Graham and Corbett, 2020) that we’d failed to recognize before was that while our science was prepared, the general public wasn’t as prepared to accept it. I became a vaccinology teacher for any one person in the world who’d listen.

So I thought a lot about what it would look like to be at a place that fundamentally understood how basic science, vaccinology, and public health could work together for the common good. In the recruitment process, it became apparent very quickly that the leaders at Harvard Chan understood the challenges associated with this massive vaccine response—from getting data published in real time to communicating with the pubic. They embraced this new-found space in academia. Like me, they recognize the importance not only of developing breakthroughs, but educating our communities in order to multiply impact. The school is built on public health activism, with a commitment to putting innovative ideas from the laboratory into action to improve people’s lives around the world. It was a match from day 1; I knew I’d be loved at Harvard Chan, not just for my science, but also for my vision of pandemic preparedness paired with community outreach.

Today, as a Harvard Chan faculty member, students and postdocs often come to me for career advice. “How did you get here?” they inquire, perhaps alluding to following in my footsteps. My reply is always as simple as my dad’s advice: “I got here by following the love.” So to you, you burgeoning academic or industry professional or science writer, if you are in that awkward career phase of deciding where to take your life next. Look into your heart, and follow it.

Go where you are and will be loved.

If you are loved somewhere, it’s almost guaranteed that you will be successful there. Godspeed.