Özlem Türeci

Özlem Türeci, M.D., Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer at BioNTech, is a physician, immunologist, and cancer researcher with translational and clinical experience. In January 2020, 2 months before the World Health Organization had declared a COVID-19 pandemic, Özlem Türeci pivoted 600 of the staff at her company BioNTech to begin developing a vaccine and in less than one year the Pfizer vaccine was ready to go. Türeci’s Pfizer vaccine is proven to be 95 percent effective, and 1.3 billion doses are to be produced in 2021.