The Covid-19 pandemic gave poignant evidence of vaccines being one of the most remarkable achievements of biomedical science. In this year’s Ef Racker Lecturer in Biology and Medicine, vaccine pioneer Peter Kim ’79 will explore how vaccines work and provide an overview of some of the most influential vaccines in history. He’ll examine the scientific breakthroughs behind the development of vaccines for cervical cancer and COVID-19 and discuss the ongoing challenge of why a vaccine for HIV continues to be elusive.

Speaker bio: Peter S. Kim is the Virginia & D.K. Ludwig Professor of Biochemistry at Stanford University School of Medicine and an Institute Scholar of Sarafan ChEM-H at Stanford. He is also a Senior Investigator of the at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, San Francisco. He was President of Merck Research Laboratories from 2003–2013 and oversaw the development of more than 20 new medicines and vaccines, including JANUVIA, GARDASIL, ISENTRESS, ZOSTAVAX, and KEYTRUDA. Earlier, he was a Professor of Biology at MIT, a Member of the Whitehead Institute, and an HHMI Investigator. He is known for discovering a salient feature (the “spring-loaded mechanism”) of how proteins cause viral membranes to fuse with cells. This discovery laid the foundation for a critical aspect of protein engineering that led to effective Covid-19 vaccines. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the National Academy of Engineering.