Bette Korber, Ph.D.

Los Alamos National Laboratory, Theoretical Biology and Biophysics Division 

Dr. Korber is a computational biologist and immunologist, she has spent her career understanding viral evolution and vaccine design, propelling her to become a global leader in these fields. Dr. Korber has earned global recognition for her exceptional work on the molecular biology and population genetics of the HIV virus that causes infection and eventually AIDS. She has contributed extensively to efforts to obtain an effective HIV vaccine and created a database at Los Alamos National Laboratory that enabled her to design novel mosaic HIV vaccines. As part of her immediate and impactful response to the COVID-19 pandemic Dr. Korber developed a computational pipeline to automatically process and analyze the vast amount of SARS-CoV-2 sequences submitted by international investigators to the global database, GISAID. As a result, Dr. Korber was among the first to identify a mutation that was more readily transmitted than the ancestral form; and since has become known as the Delta variant, now the most dominant form worldwide.