Katalin Karik贸 is professor at her alma mater, University of Szeged, Hungary, and adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked for 24 years. She is former senior vice president at BioNTech SE, Mainz, Germany, where she worked between 2013-2022. Her patents, co-invented with Drew Weissman on nucleoside-modified uridines in mRNA was used to create the FDA-approved COVID-19 mRNA vaccines by BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna to fight the pandemic. For her achievements she received many prestigious awards, including the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.