Kathleen Neuzil ’87 was first “taken by the power of vaccines” as a Johns Hopkins medical student after she encountered a young patient with Hib meningitis — the same bacterial illness that had caused deafness in two of her own childhood acquaintances. When a new vaccine to prevent the disease came to market soon afterward, she recognized its power to transform lives.

“Watching that unfold in my early career was really inspiring, to see that power of prevention,” says Neuzil, who has since carved out an international reputation for expanding vaccine access and delivery around the world.

Last spring, Neuzil was named director of the Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health, which supports international health research and partnerships through funds and training. Neuzil is the first female director of the center, which has a budget of $95 million and has provided training to nearly 8,500 individuals from 132 countries since 1989.

She came to the influential post from the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where, as director of the Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health, she helped develop and deploy vaccines for Zika and Ebola viruses and malaria, among other diseases.

Critically, during the coronavirus pandemic, Neuzil steered clinical trials that guided the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s emergency approval for COVID-19 vaccines. For her efforts, The Baltimore Sun named her Marylander of the Year in 2020.

At Fogarty, Neuzil says she is focused on “building a strong scientific ecosystem as we face unprecedented global health challenges from climate change and other factors,” including rising typhoid and cholera rates, dengue outbreaks, and vector-borne diseases that are antimicrobial resistant.

She is especially passionate about supporting the careers of scientists from low- and middle-income countries and backgrounds. “I’ve had plenty of opportunities given to me as a researcher, at Hopkins and elsewhere,” she says, “so this is important to me.”