Hungarian biochemist Katalin Kariko is the winner of the inaugural Public Media s Person of the Year Award in Hungary. Her work was crucial in the development of one of the vaccines against COVID-19.

The Public Media s Person of the Year Award, jointly founded by the Hungarian Duna Media Service Provider Non-profit Corporation and MTVA (Media Services and Support Trust Fund), is always handed out at year s end to someone who has created lasting value during his or her professional career which had a significant impact on the events of that year. In 2020, a year marked by the coronavirus pandemic, the founders choice fell on biochemist Katalin Kariko, the inventor of a patent which led to the development of one of the coronavirus vaccines.

„In 2020, our lives and the entire world were determined by the pandemic. Our daily lives had to be constrained to prevent the spread of the virus, while nurses and doctors have been making a superhuman effort to keep the virus at bay. The first news reports regarding a possible vaccine came at the end of the summer. Hungarian researcher Katalin Kariko played a big role in the development of that vaccine, which can enable humanity to leave the Covid-19 pandemic behind. There would be no worthier recipient of the Public Media s Person of the Year Award 2020 than Ms Kariko, who gave us all hope with her discovery”, said Menyhert Dobos, the CEO of Duna Media Service Provider Non-profit Corporation, praising the biochemist s work.

Katalin Kariko, a research biologist and biochemist born in the central Hungarian city of Szolnok, was a student of biology at the University of Szeged, Hungary, and received her PhD in 1983 at the Szeged Biological Research Centre. She then became a researcher of the same institute with a scholarship granted by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She then continued her work in the United States. She is currently senior vice president of BioNTech, a company involved in the development of the coronavirus vaccine.