Lisa McCorkell

Lisa McCorkell is an American public health researcher, policy analyst and Long COVID advocate who co-founded the Patient-Led Research Collaborative (PLRC). McCorkell co-founded PLRC together with Hannah Davis and three others with Long COVID, several of whom had prior research experience. They were frustrated with the lack of research on long-term impacts of a COVID-19 infection in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. She has done research on the topic of employment and labor, such as a study on the effect of stable scheduling for retail workers.

Patient-Led Research Collaborative After reading an article on Long COVID by Fiona Lowenstein in The New York Times, McCorkell and other future founders of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative (PLRC) joined the Body Politic COVID-19 Support Group. A team was formed to study Long COVID. Gina Assaf launched an initial survey in April 2020 and McCorkell helped analyse what would be the first research published on Long COVID a few weeks later. The survey highlighted that neurological problems were common in COVID. A second survey detailed how symptoms evolved over a period of 7 months.

McCorkell co-founded the PLRC with four other women with long COVID. McCorkell left the PLRC in 2025.

Selected publications

Davis HE, Assaf GS, McCorkell L, Wei H, Low RJ, Re'em Y, Redfield S, Austin JP, Akrami A. Characterizing long COVID in an international cohort: 7 months of symptoms and their impact. eClinicalMedicine. 38:101019 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2021.101019 Davis HE, McCorkell L, Vogel JM, Topol EJ. Long COVID: major findings, mechanisms, and recommendations. Nature Reviews Microbiology. 21(3): 133-146 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41579-022-00846-2 Al-Aly Z, Davis H, McCorkell L, Soares L, Wulf-Hanson S, Iwasaki A, Topol EJ. Long COVID science, research and policy. Nature Medicine. volume 30, pages 2148–2164 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-024-03173-6