Corbett joined the faculty at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in 2000 and moved to Harare, Zimbabwe in 2001.[4][5] She joined the LSHTM as a Wellcome Trust Fellow[6] and established the country's first tuberculosis laboratory.[4] Corbett decided to start in Zimbabwe as the country has quality medical education and good public health infrastructure, and Corbett recruited scientists and technicians from the local community.[4] In 2005 she was awarded a Senior Research Fellowship which allowed her to evaluate tuberculosis screening protocols.[4] Corbett worked with the World Health Organization HIV Department in Geneva to investigate the access that healthcare workers in African countries have to HIV testing and care.[4] At the time HIV self-testing was not very accessible, but was the primary form of diagnosis for healthcare workers. Corbett worked with the World Health Organization to support self-testing for healthcare workers. The success of this project meant that Corbett moved to Malawi.[4]
Since 2009 Corbett has worked as an Epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and part of the Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Trust program based in Blantyre.[7][8] She was promoted to Professor in 2012 and led the world's first large evaluation of HIV self-testing.[4] She has since lobbied Unitaid and Population Services International to provide self-testing in six African countries, raising over $72 million to support research and community-level implementation.[4] The HIV self-testing kits have since been taken up by 59 countries, and over 6 million were used in 2018.[4] Alongside HIVself-testing, Corbett is interested in tuberculosis management in HIV prevalent populations.[9] She has investigated whether sputum microscopy or X-ray based diagnostics could be used to diagnose cases of tuberculosis in communities impacted by high rates of tuberculosis and HIV, as well as whether HIV self-testing should be offered to people who have tuberculosis-like symptoms.[10] She has investigated the epidemic of long-term survivors of perinatal HIV transmission.[11] Alongside her scientific research, Corbett has designed research training and taught students at the Malawi College of Medicine.[4]
Awards and honours
In 2018 Corbett was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.[12] She delivered the 2018 Stephen Lawn Memorial Lecture.[13] Corbett has served on various advisory boards within the World Health Organization, including membership of the Strategic & Technical Advisory Group.[14] Other awards and honours include;
1995 Dr Ethel Williams Prize for Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge[11]
2001 Woodruff Medal from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine[11]
^Corbett, Elizabeth L. (2006). "Tuberculosis in sub-Saharan Africa: opportunities, challenges, and change in the era of antiretroviral treatment". The Lancet. 367 (9514): 926–937. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(06)68383-9. PMID16546541. S2CID2255955.
