He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022[3],and was elected a member of the National Academy of Medicine in 2025.[4]
Early life and education
Graham was born in Kansas City,Missouri,the first son of Barney Dan Graham,DDS and Carol Ann Hastings and spent most of his childhood in Olathe,Kansas through early high school. The family moved to a farm near Paola,Kansas,where he graduated from Paola High School as valedictorian in 1971. He attended college at Rice University and graduated magna cum laude in 1975 with a BA degree in biology. After earning his medical degree from the University of Kansas School of Medicine in 1979,Graham continued his training at Vanderbilt University where he completed his internship,residency,consecutive chief residencies at Nashville General Hospital and Vanderbilt University Medical Center,followed by infectious diseases fellowship,and a PhD in Microbiology and Immunology.[5]
Career
By 1982,Graham was appointed chief resident at Nashville General Hospital,[6] where he treated Tennessee's first AIDS patient.[7] Following this,he was named to a chief residency at Vanderbilt University Medical Center,[8] where he led one of the first human trials of candidate AIDS vaccines.[9] The results of the trial found that the two experimental AIDS vaccines proved to yield the best immune response in patients.[10] During his time at Vanderbilt,Graham was working simultaneously on his Ph.D. in microbiology.[8]
Graham was elected a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation in 1996.[11] In 2000,the National Institutes of Health (NIH) recruited him to create a vaccine evaluation clinic (Vaccine Research Center),but he insisted on maintaining a research laboratory to focus on vaccines for three categories of respiratory viruses.[7] During the 2015–2016 Zika virus epidemic,Graham and Ted Pierson,chief of the Laboratory of Viral Diseases,collaborated to create a vaccine intended to prevent the Zika virus. Moving from inception to manufacturing in just three months,they began a Phase 2 clinical trial in March 2017 to measure its effectiveness. In recognition of their efforts,they were finalists for the 2018 Promising Innovations Medal.[12]
By 2017,working alongside Jason McLellan,a structural biologist,they discovered that "adding two prolines to a key joint of a vaccine's spike protein could stabilize the structure's prefusion shape" (patent WO2018081318A1). Later,this method would be applied to the COVID-19 vaccine.[13] During the COVID-19 pandemic,Graham's laboratory partnered with Moderna to develop vaccine technology. He was a member of the research team that designed a spike protein to combat the virus.[13] He also participated in the NIH's Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutics and Vaccines (ACTIV) initiative as a member of its TRACE Working Group.[14]
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