Christian Drosten studied medicine in Frankfurt am Main/Germany. He received his doctoral degree in 2003 with a thesis on high-throughput testing of blood donors for HBV and HIV-1. From June 2000, Drosten joined the virology department at Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg. His group focused on virus discovery and molecular diagnostics of tropical viral diseases. From 2007, Drosten became full professor and chair at the Institute of Virology at University of Bonn Medical Center. In 2017, he moved to Charité in Berlin, where he is currently the Director of the Institute of Virology. He was a member of the German Ministry of Health’s International Advisory Board on Global Health from 2017-2019. Drosten co-discovered the SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV), for which he developed the first diagnostic tests in 2003. He worked on Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) for which he resolved many aspects of the natural history of disease in humans and animals. In January 2020, his team developed the first SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR test that was approved by the WHO and globally applied. His subsequent work focused on characterizing essential disease traits and diagnostic approaches in COVID-19. During the pandemic, he has been consulting German federal and state authorities and was appointed to the European Commission’s advisory panel on Covid-19.