Texas Southern's Dr. Zuri Dale helped vaccinate 40,000 in the pandemic, now she's innovating beauty

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- All throughout March, we've been highlighting leading ladies doing work in their communities as part of Women's History Month. Dr. Zuri Dale at Texas Southern University is a double threat.

"STEM is just so fun. I have always known I was going to be a woman in the sciences," she said with a smile.

When Dale was in 9th grade at Barbara Jordan High School, a science project turned into an invite to do research after school at Texas Southern University. From there, she went on to study biology and chemistry for undergrad at Texas Southern University, then got her Masters in Biological Engineering and Hydrologic Sciences and Public Health and Epidemiology at Texas A&M. As long as that resume is, it didn't stop there.

"After I finished that degree, I went on to pursue my doctoral work at Mercer University," she said.

Everything has come full circle. In 2021, Dale returned to TSU as an employee in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her current title? Campus Epidemiologist/Interim Assistant VP of Research and Innovation.

"Being able to exist in this space -- it just feels like home for me," she said.

Unofficially dubbed the COVID czar, Dale was on the front line of a disease that upended the world. Millions died, and the Black and brown communities were hit especially hard. Dale knew that, but that motivated her and her team to work that much harder.

"How urgent and important was your work at the time, being the COVID czar, considering folks who looked like us were dying very rapidly?" Erica Simon asked.

"When TSU received funding in order to ramp up our COVID-19 implementation and response, it was so important for us to do this here. Texas Southern is a community university," Dale said.

In the end, more than 40,000 people were vaccinated onsite at TSU, and more than 16,000 PCR-based tests were analyzed. The student body at TSU had a 72-percent vaccination rate. Dale has used her passion for how things are formed to jump into the beauty world. In addition to being a scientist, she's also a licensed tattoo artist, and specializes in cosmetic makeup. She has a salon in EaDo called Artistry by Zuri and just launched her own numbing cream called Sensationless.

"What I really wanted was to show this merger between art and science and beauty and science and how all of these beauty things and beauty tools that we use, what is the science behind those. So, my business really hyper focuses on the science of beauty," Dale said.

She's still in her 30's, but Dale has accomplished more than many will in their lifetime. Her journey hasn't been easy, and she tells ABC13 she's had to fight indirect discriminations and prove time and time again that she does belong in the rooms she's in - even if she's often the only Black, and often the only woman. In a way, that's her superpower.

"My goal is for some young girl or for some young student of color to be able to Google and see me so that they will not have to have such a difficult time finding a scientist that looks like them," she said.

Going forward, Dale and her colleagues will continue studying the effects of long-COVID, which as we've recently learned, is more prevalent that we thought.

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