Emilio Emini, senior vice-president, International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, New York

A broad interest in biology and economic necessity combined to steer Emilio Emini into graduate school. He had cultivated a general interest in the life sciences during his undergraduate years, but when he graduated, he wasn't sure what to do with it. With a recession under way, employment opportunities were scarce.

“What do you do when job prospects are bleak?” asks Emini. “You go to grad school.” He won a National Science Foundation pre-doctoral fellowship and headed for Cornell University. Passing through a number of labs during his first year, Emini ended up in one working on a strain of Venezuelan encephalitis virus. He found exploring the pathogenesis of different strains fascinating and became hooked on virology (see CV).

For his postdoc, Emini moved to the State University of New York at Stony Brook, primarily because Eckard Wimmer, an expert on poliovirus worked there. At the time, polio was one of the most understood viruses, so it made a good starting point to explore virology further.

When Emini arrived, Wimmer was finishing the genome sequence of poliovirus. That, coupled with the advent of monoclonal antibodies, meant that Emini could explore biological questions with brand new tools — a chance that had him feeling “like a kid in a candy shop”.

Emini switched to industry in 1983 when Merck's expansion in vaccine research matched his rising interest in the field. He didn't expect to stay in industry, but “the science kept getting interesting”, he says. He worked on HIV as the company moved into AIDS research during the mid-1980s and helped to develop the multidrug cocktails that now allow many people to live with the virus.

He rose through the ranks at Merck, but found that as a senior vice-president of vaccine research, he could no longer focus on HIV. And, as a manager, his schedule often kept him from the lab.

As he approached his fiftieth birthday, he realized that he wanted to focus on HIV, and that he needed 10–15 years to make an impact. “It was an alignment of the planets,” Emini says.

Taking over as senior vice-president at the International AIDS Vaccine Institute in New York, he is in some ways back where he started — looking at a big problem and hoping he can use new technologies to crack it.