Bette Korber is an American computational biologist focusing on the molecular biology and population genetics of the HIV virus that causes infection and eventually AIDS.

[1] She created a database at Los Alamos National Laboratory that has enabled her to design novel mosaic HIV vaccines, one of which is currently in human testing in Africa.

[4] From 1981 to 1988, she was in the graduate program at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where she worked with Iwona Stroynowski in Leroy Hood's laboratory,[4] receiving her PhD in chemistry in 1988.

[4] Her work focused on regulation of the expression of major histocompatibility complex type 1 genes, producing cell surface proteins that participate in the rejection of tissue transplants, by interferon induced by viral infections.

[8] There, Korber used polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to show both complete and deleted versions of viral genomes in leukemic cells.

[13] She first became interested in HIV when a close friend of hers and her fiancé's at Caltech contracted one of the first cases of AIDS in Pasadena, California.

[17] In 2009, she described a designed mosaic protein this way: "People didn't know if it would fold properly, if it would be antigenic, or if it would have the same sites that recognized by killer T cells".

[16] Also, Korber and her collaborators have developed a graphical analysis called Epigraph that can generate promising antigens with a mixture of epitopes.

[20] Korber and her colleagues employed the Los Alamos National Laboratory database's genomic data to calculate when the HIV sequence evolution began, using a model of evolution based on the mutation rate of HIV strains and assuming that variable was the same on all branches of the evolutionary tree.

[28] As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, Korber and her Los Alamos colleagues devised computational strategies that look for evolutionary changes in genes that encode the Spike proteins that stud the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and give it its crown-like appearance.

[29] Her strategies can examine millions of global genomes stored by GISAID, and it flags mutations that vary from the original Wuhan sequence by at least a minimum specified threshold amount.

[30] Using this strategy, she and colleagues identified a particular Spike mutation, Aspartic acid (Asp) to Glycine (Gly) at position 614 (D614G), that was gaining prevalence across the globe since February 2020.

As of September 28, 2021, she and her group continue to analyze GISAID data for novel variants,[34][29] and she continues to be an active member of the NIH TRACE Working Group,[35] whose objective is to "provide actionable intelligence on SARS-CoV-2 variants through genomic surveillance, data sharing and curation, and standardized in vitro assessments of therapeutics against novel strains."

[36] She also contributed to the distribution of Earth Boxes of maintenance-free portable gardens to orphanages, clinics, and schools in Africa.

[13] In 2019, Korber led a series of lectures called Frontiers in Science that focused on her work designing a vaccine against HIV.