In 1989, Icelander Örn Almarsson decided to go to the United States to get a PhD, which wasn’t feasible at the time in his home country. The plan was to go for graduate school and go back to Iceland, but after five years at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Almarsson settled into Boston, where he did a postdoc at MIT, a stint at Merck, and eventually ended up at a fledgling Bob Langer company known as Moderna.

Almarsson told Inside Precision Medicine, “Moderna was very small at the time, and we had almost no delivery team, but I was fortunate to be given the opportunity to build that, to create some custom process chemistry that would later enable products such as the COVID vaccine. This was a compelling, exciting, and challenging period in my life, and it has influenced

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