Meet Dr Happi. With $100m and a steely determination could he save the world from the next pandemic?

Winning the world’s health lottery is a lonely business in the current climate. “It’s like being an orphan in a space where there used to be many kids playing – suddenly everybody’s gone and you’re just there with a ball,” says Dr Christian Happi.

The Cameroonian distinguished professor of molecular biology and genomics has just won $100m for his work – at a time when global health funding is being viciously slashed as part of wider aid cuts.

“It gets very lonely when you have this type of resource, and then around you, your colleagues have nothing to do, don’t have resources to work and are closing down labs,” says the 57-year-old from his office at Redeemer’s University in Ede, Nigeria.

Awarded every four years by the US MacArthur foundation to an initiative “that promises real and measurable progress in solving a critical problem of our time”, the grant honours Happi and his co-founder, computational geneticist Dr Pardis Sabeti, who have already saved an uncountable number of lives. Together they have helped identify, and therefore stem, potentially disastrous outbreaks of yellow fever in Nigeria, mpox in Sierra Leone and Marburg virus in Rwanda.