Katalin Karikó is a professor at University of Szeged and adjunct professor of neurosurgery at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, where she has worked for 24 years. She is former senior vice president at BioNTech SE, Mainz, Germany, where she worked between 2013-2022. She received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from University of Szeged, Hungary, in 1982.

For four decades, her research has focused on RNA-mediated mechanisms with the ultimate goal of developing in vitro-transcribed mRNA for protein therapy. She investigated RNA-mediated immune activation and co-discovered that nucleoside modifications suppress immunogenicity of RNA, which widened the therapeutic potentials of mRNA. Her patents, co-invented with Drew Weissman on nucleoside-modified uridines in mRNA have been used to create the FDA-approved COVID-19 mRNA vaccines by BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna to fight the pandemic.

For her achievement she received many prestigious awards, including the Japan Prize, the Horwitz Prize, the Franklin Award, the Princess Asturias Award, the BBVA award, Jiménez Díaz Prize, the Breakthrough Prize, the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award and the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.