BALTIMORE – Although her colleagues describe her as incredibly humble, Dr. Kirsten Lyke’s exceptional work in the medical field not only speaks for itself, it shouts from the rooftops.
Not only did Lyke help develop the first Ebola vaccine and the first Zika virus vaccine, she worked on the phase one studies of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. While that is one of the more impressive parts of her background, Lyke’s passion for taking care of the world encompasses everything she does.
“Maybe my secret sauce is, I have the untapped potential to just work that little bit harder, or try a little bit more,” she said. “I’m not going to accept that something isn’t going to work out.”
Lyke is a professor of medicine and the director of the Vector-Borne Diseases Vaccine and Challenge Unit at the Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.
She also is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. Lyke was among the nearly 200 members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine who signed a letter urging the Trump administration to reconsider potential federal funding cuts to science programs.
“These are really treacherous times,” she told Capital News Service in an interview. “You just don’t know what’s around the corner in academics.”
Lyke joined the faculty in 2002. Before landing at UMD, Lyke received her undergraduate degree from Cornell University, attended graduate school at Georgetown University, completed her residency at Duke University, and conducted research as a part of a fellowship at Johns Hopkins University.
Despite her years of professional and academic experience, Lyke’s path to where she is now was not so clear at the start. She said she did not know early on that she wanted to become a doctor or a professor of medicine; she actually wanted to become an archaeologist first and had applied to medical school “on a whim.”
Born in Denmark but raised in the remote Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Lyke has always loved to travel, which is what led her to think about pursuing archaeology. But in medical school, she still managed to travel extensively, leading her to study tropical diseases – what she is doing to this day.
However, Lyke said her early education system was somewhat unsupportive. She said her teachers did not think big and that her guidance counselor did not believe in her. Her family didn’t understand why she wanted to leave the Upper Peninsula. Her high school did not even offer advanced placement classes, and she said that her school had a mindset that a third of the class would not last the entire year. These negative influences only pushed her to work harder.
To become a member of one of the national academies, one has to be invited or nominated by current members. Despite the great honor and recognition among peers in her field, Lyke’s colleagues still believe that she is underappreciated.
Dr. Justin Ortiz, professor of medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said that he would have declined being interviewed if this story was about almost anyone else, but he was eager to speak about Lyke.
“She’s one of the best-kept secrets here at the University of Maryland,” Ortiz said. “She’s so highly regarded in what she does in her particular area of research, and I don’t think that the broader research community here at the university appreciates just how special she is.”
Ortiz has worked collaboratively with Lyke in vaccine research since he arrived at the University of Maryland’s medical school in 2018. He worked in one of her studies in the past, and she is an investigator for his work as well.
“She is just so giving of her time and expertise,” Ortiz said. “She is going above and beyond the expectations of a collaborator to really help me to develop a research plan… It’s nice to have somebody with her experience and knowledge acting as counselor and a guide.”
Lyke said her approach is to “be in the trenches” with everyone with whom she works.
“If the nurses have to be here at seven, I’m going to be here at 6:55,” Lyke said. “If they have to stay late, I’m going to stay late with them. Not that I’m doing their job for them, and I’m not hovering and overseeing because I don’t trust them. It’s more because…it’s not fair if I pick up and go home.”
Collaborative work on research projects is not the only thing Lyke does.
“In academic medicine, we are all supposed to wear different hats. One is patient care, another is teaching, another is research,” Ortiz said. “She is indeed, truly a triple threat. She’s a great clinician, she’s a great teacher and mentor, and she’s also a great scientist.”
Dr. Anthony Amoroso, associate professor of medicine at the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said it was “rare” to be able to be a clinician, a scientist, and an educator all at once, but Lyke excels at what she does.
“She’s a gem on this campus, there is no doubt,” Amoroso said. He has worked with Lyke in an HIV clinic for 25 years.
When they work together, Amoroso said they talk about anything and everything. Yet, Amoroso emphasized, Lyke never speaks about herself or acts in a self-promoting way.
“She knows an enormous amount about vaccinology…She’s an expert, a world’s expert, in these things, and you wouldn’t know it,” Amoroso said. “If there’s an infectious disease fellow or a resident or somebody around and she walks by, I usually stop her and make her introduce herself. I’ll speak highly of her because she won’t.”
Lyke’s impact is global. She has provided vaccines and health services in many countries around the world, including Mali, Brazil, Tanzania and Nepal.
In her early days on the faculty at UMD, she spent between seven and eight years traveling back and forth to Mali, where she led trips for college students who received training grants.
“I was actually the person in the field. I was kind of the touch point person for all the students, and we had a lot of students,” Lyke said. “That was actually pretty fun, because most of them had never been to Africa, and it was exciting for them to be out in the field.”
Lyke said that one of her proudest accomplishments is her children, whom she adopted from Nepal. If she hadn’t worked in Nepal with the organization Himalayan HealthCare, she never would have met her future children.
With Himalayan HealthCare, Lyke produced clinical services at high altitudes and remote locations – places where the nearest clinics were a 10-day hike away.
While in high school, Lyke was selected for a backpacking trip throughout Europe. This was her first time leaving home on her own. The group traveled 30 to 40 miles a day, from Amsterdam to Rome, sleeping in tents in the woods and on the sides of roads. Lyke attributes this experience to her strong desire to travel, and she also gained confidence to travel to more remote places.
“I really can’t believe my parents let me do that,” Lyke said with a chuckle.
Her love of travel and connecting with nature extends beyond her work. She enjoys running, biking, and hiking outdoors. She even went back to school to become certified as a master naturalist in the state of Virginia. Additionally, she volunteers on weekends with groups of people to participate in “citizen science” and to clean up local environments.
“It’s really rewarding; it’s pretty fun,” Lyke said. “No one really knows I’m a doctor. We’re all just out there on equal footing.”
Currently, she is working on vaccines to help curb dengue and malaria. Normally it takes years to get vaccine research off the ground, but during the COVID-19 pandemic, she and her team had to accelerate their timeline. Lyke was the one who came up with the idea to mix and match the COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.
“I was on the COVID clinical team, so it was just a small group of infectious disease physicians who volunteered to take care of all the COVID cases in the hospital,” Lyke described. “It was super exciting and also super scary, but rewarding, because a lot of people didn’t volunteer… Maybe that’s why I’ve been drawn to all of these, the science of outbreaks and pandemics and epidemics, because it feels like there’s an urgency, so you have to be efficient and think clearly and get work done.”
Lyke expressed her gratitude for every opportunity that has come her way.
“One piece of advice is to just follow your own kind of internal barometer,” Lyke said. “I couldn’t have invented this career. It was all just kind of being open to an opportunity as it arose and recognizing, ‘okay, this is a good opportunity.’”
Lyke hopes that the future of American science will remain bright, despite the Trump administration’s assault on funding for key institutions such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
“It’s dispiriting to see all the meanness in people,” Lyke said. “You have to have a purpose every morning, and it shouldn’t be to destroy other people. So I guess my hope is that things level out and science marches forward.”
If there is one message Lyke would want to share, it would be to not let anyone dissuade you from doing something at which you are good and passionate.
“Follow your own compass; everyone’s path is a little bit different,” Lyke said. “Your subconscious knows if you’re on the wrong path and you’re just not happy. You know that fundamentally, even though it might be hard to step off.”
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