Katalin Karikó, a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist whose research helped save lives during the COVID-19 pandemic, will be the keynote speaker at the Johns Hopkins University’s Commencement ceremony on May 21, officials announced on Wednesday.
Karikó is also one of six individuals who will receive honorary degrees from Hopkins during the May 21 ceremony at Homewood Field. The others are: CNN news anchor Wolf Blitzer; Hopkins cancer researcher Bert Vogelstein; theoretical ecologist Simon A. Levin; American Red Cross president and CEO Gail J. McGovern, and artist Amy Sherald, whose recent solo exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art set a 21st century attendance record there.
A native of Hungary who emigrated to the United States in 1985, Karikó, 71, has a powerful story to tell about not giving up in the face of adversity and pressing forward against uncertain odds.
According to Hopkins, Karikó has been navigating unfamiliar territory since she was 13, when she traveled alone across Hungary by train and on foot to reach a selective science summer camp. The following year, she went to Hungary’s capital, Budapest, for a national biology competition, where she placed third in the country. She went on to conduct research that would help save millions of lives.
“Since her childhood days exploring the biology of plants and animals, Katalin Karikó has demonstrated an extraordinary passion for scientific discovery,” Johns Hopkins University President Ron Daniels said in a statement announcing her selection as keynote speaker.
“Katalin’s decades-long pursuit of understanding mRNA and its promise — sustained in the face of countless obstacles and scientific consensus — is a stirring example of the power of basic research and its potential to improve and save the lives of millions of people,” Daniels said. “As we celebrate our 150th anniversary as America’s first research university, Katalin’s story is a powerful reminder of how perseverance, vision, and curiosity can change the world.”
Messenger RNA, or mRNA, is a type of single-stranded RNA molecule that acts as the genetic messenger, carrying instructions from DNA in the cell nucleus to the cytoplasm, where it directs the synthesis of proteins. It is a critical component of gene expression, serving as an intermediate template between genetic code and protein production.
According to the Hub, Hopkins’ in-house news source, “Karikó grew up in a small town in Hungary, the daughter of a butcher who lost his position after participating in the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Neither parent had attended high school, but both prized education. At the University of Szeged, where Karikó earned her PhD in biochemistry in 1982, she grew captivated by the therapeutic promise of messenger RNA, a molecule she believed could one day instruct the human body to produce proteins it needed. Few shared her conviction.”
Emigrating to the United States
In 1985, the Hub said, “Karikó and her husband, Béla, emigrated to the United States with their young daughter. Hungarian law restricted exportable currency, so the family sold their car and sewed the proceeds into a stuffed teddy bear to bring with them.”
Karikó joined the University of Pennsylvania in 1989 as a researcher, but her work was not immediately supported. For many years, the Hub said, she “toiled in obscurity.” Here is how the Hub described the obstacles she faced as a faculty member:
“There, her pioneering work was largely ignored — grant agencies repeatedly rejected her proposals on mRNA therapy, and Penn demoted her from her research faculty position. Working with a colleague, immunologist Drew Weissman, she investigated why the immune system attacks synthetic mRNA. Their finding that substituting modified nucleosides could suppress that immune response was largely overlooked by the scientific community when it was published in 2005. But in 2020, when the SARS-CoV-2 virus emerged, the mRNA platform Karikó and Weissman had refined over two decades became the backbone for the BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, the first mRNA vaccines ever approved by the FDA — a monumental, lifesaving achievement. In 2023, the pair received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their research.
According to the Hub, Karikó continues her work as a professor at the University of Szeged in her native Hungary and as an adjunct professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Among her many honors are the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, the Breakthrough Prize, the Canada Gairdner Award, and the Tang Prize. She will receive a Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Hopkins during the commencement ceremony this month.
Five more honorary degree recipients
As is frequently the case at Hopkins graduations, some of its honorary degree recipients are better known to the public than others. McGovern, Blitzer and Fogelstein are Hopkins graduates, and Fogelstein is a Baltimore native. Sherald lived in Baltimore while attending the Maryland Institute College of Art as a graduate student and several years afterwards and has received widespread attention for her traveling exhibit, Amy Sherald: American Sublime.
Blitzer is perhaps best known to the general public as a CNN reporter and news anchor. According to the Hub, the university’s in-house news source, he began his career as a reporter in 1972, shortly after earning a master’s degree in international relations from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. He joined the Reuters News Agency in Tel Aviv, then spent more than 15 years as Washington correspondent for The Jerusalem Post.
In 1990, Blitzer joined CNN as military affairs correspondent at the Pentagon, where he covered the Persian Gulf War among other conflicts. He went on to serve as CNN’s senior White House correspondent, anchored Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, and in 2005 launched The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer. He recently received attention for being one of the first journalists to report about the shootings at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 25.
Following is biographical information about the other honorary degree recipients, provided by the Hub:
Simon A. Levin
Simon A. Levin is among the world’s preeminent mathematical ecologists, a scholar who has spent more than six decades weaving together mathematics, biology, and complexity theory to illuminate the forces that govern life on Earth. His foundational work on the complex dynamics of ecosystems has fundamentally reshaped how scientists understand the natural world and the urgent need to protect it. As the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University and director of the Center for BioComplexity in the High Meadows Environmental Institute, Levin has built a body of research that spans the structure and function of ecosystems, the dynamics of infectious disease, and the coupling of ecological and socioeconomic systems. He is among the pioneers of the field of spatial ecology, which analyzes natural patterns in the distribution and movement of organisms across a landscape, from seed dispersal to the seasonal migrations of wildebeest herds.
Gail J. McGovern
Gail J. McGovern was among the first women to enroll as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University, joining a pioneering group from the Class of 1974. In the decades since, she has built an extraordinary career marked by leadership, resilience, and service — rising to the highest levels of corporate America and later devoting the second act of her professional life to humanitarian leadership. From 2008 to 2024, she served as president and chief executive officer of the American Red Cross — one of the nation’s oldest and most trusted humanitarian organizations — becoming the nonprofit’s longest-serving chief executive since its founder, Clara Barton. Prior to joining the Red Cross, she rose to the role of executive vice president of AT&T’s Consumer Markets Division, served as president of Fidelity Personal Investments, and subsequently joined the faculty of Harvard Business School. Fortune magazine has twice recognized her as one of the 50 most powerful women in corporate America.
Bert Vogelstein
Bert Vogelstein grew up in Baltimore, earned his MD [Doctor of Medicine degree] at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and completed his residency in pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Cancer Institute, he returned to Hopkins as a faculty member in 1978. Ten years later, his laboratory published a landmark paper in The New England Journal of Medicine demonstrating that colorectal cancer tumors result from a sequence of genetic mutations, a finding that reoriented the field at a time when most researchers attributed cancer to infections or immune defects. The following year, the lab identified the tumor suppressor gene p53, now recognized as a factor in many cancer types and named “Molecule of the Year” by Science magazine in 1993. The work that followed mapped the genetic sequences of approximately 90 different cancers and established the foundation for personalized medicine. He received the inaugural Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences in 2013, among many other honors.
Amy Sherald
Amy Sherald’s precise, luminous canvases populated by everyday Black Americans have established her as one of the most significant portrait artists of her generation. Her signature style took shape during her time in Baltimore—she renders her subjects’ skin in grisaille, a grayscale palette that decouples the figure from the concept of color-as-race, while dressing them in vivid, carefully chosen clothing against saturated backgrounds. In 2016, she became the first woman and first African American to win the grand prize in the prestigious Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Two years later, she was selected by Michelle Obama to paint the former first lady’s official portrait for the National Portrait Gallery, an image that introduced her art to a global audience.
“Our honorary degree recipients this year have had a profound and lasting impact on the world in which we live, through lifesaving research, paradigm-shifting scholarship, humanitarian leadership and artistic expression,” Daniels said in a statement. “We are honored to bestow the university’s highest recognition on these six distinguished individuals who each, in their own way, embody our commitment to creativity, innovation, and humanity.”
