Dr Bette Korber

Dr Bette Korber is a consultant for several universities on viral evolution and vaccine projects, and a part-time scientist at the New Mexico Consortium, a non-profit organization that fosters collaboration among New Mexico universities, industry, and national laboratories. Dr Korber graduated from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) with a PhD in chemistry in 1988. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University on viral evolution before joining the Theoretical Biology Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in 1990. For many years, she also held a visiting professorship at the Santa Fe Institute. Dr Korber retired as a Fellow from LANL in the autumn of 2023. 

Dr Korber’s professional career has focused on developing computational strategies to study pathogen evolution and immune responses, with the ultimate goal of enabling vaccine design and assessment. Her primary contributions include advancing the understanding of HIV evolution both at the population level and within infected hosts, as part of global efforts to develop an effective HIV vaccine. To support these goals, she led the global HIV sequence and immunology database project at Los Alamos from 1993 to 2020. Beyond HIV, Dr Korber has contributed to research on other emerging pathogens, including drug-resistant tuberculosis, Ebola, monkeypox, and hepatitis C. In recent years, she has also participated in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) SARS-CoV-2 Assessment of Viral Evolution (SAVE) project, monitoring newly emergent SARS-CoV-2 variants.