Shi Zhengli. No,she's not going to save us from COVID but her work may well stave off a future coronavirus.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Dedicated soul! She's spent hundreds of hours crawling bat caves, catching bats, sampling bat fluids and excrement and documenting the antibodies and pathogens they carry. (Talk about putting yourself on the front line!) She has now retired from that front line but will continue to build a database of coronaviruses that is probably beyond anything mankind has done before.

Ben