Marquis Who's Who Pays Homage to World Leaders of Esteem in November Maker's List

The Maker's List also recognizes U.S. immigrant trailblazers whose pursuit of the American dream has set global precedents for innovation and success

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Marquis Who's Who

Nov 04, 2021, 09:05 ET

UNIONDALE, N.Y., Nov. 4, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Marquis Who's Who (MWW), the world's leading biographical publisher, is proud to announce the honorees selected for its November Maker's List, celebrating World Leaders of Esteem. The Maker's Lists are directed by Erica Lee, CEO of MWW, and aim to recognize both established and emerging leaders in their respective fields.

"The impact immigrants have had on this country is boundless. As a product of both Jamaican and Chinese families that immigrated to the United States, I am acutely aware of both the struggles and successes experienced by immigrants," said Erica Lee, CEO of MWW. "Each experience, story and memory are important and should be documented as a testament to generations of individuals who set lofty goals and were unwavering in the pursuit of their dreams." Lee continued, "We marvel at their achievements and find inspiration in their passion."

The MWW Maker's List series began in January 2021 with Thought Leaders and progressed to include African American Catalysts for Change, Women Luminaries, Business and Finance Leaders, and Influencers in STEM and AAPI. The MWW Maker's Lists have also recognized LGBTQ+ Catalysts for Change, Attorneys, Activists and Agents of Change, Latin American Leaders, and Arts, Culture, Sports and Entertainment Moguls. MWW Maker's Lists are curated by a selection committee to bring into focus outstanding thought leaders and change-makers across industries. Members of the selection committee hail from diverse professional backgrounds in publishing, entertainment, law, business, journalism, marketing, graphic design, public relations and print media.

The World Leaders of Esteem list includes:

Adar Poonawalla: Poonawalla has served as the chief executive officer of the Serum Institute of India since 2011, having joined the institute in 2001 following his graduation from the University of Westminster in London. The Serum Institute, which was founded by his father Dr. Cyrus Poonawalla, is the world's largest vaccine manufacturer. Recognizing the early spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, Poonawalla promised up to two billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines by the close of 2021; his vow formed the foundation upon which COVAX, a global initiative to provide vaccines to underserved countries, developed its own plan for global vaccine access. Due to his unwavering fight against COVID-19 and efforts in supplying vaccines across the globe, Poonawalla was named Entrepreneur of the Year by Economic Times in 2021 and among TIME's 100 most influential people of 2021.
John Nkengasong: Nkengasong draws upon 30 years of experience in public health and has served as the inaugural director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention since 2016. In 2020, he was appointed a special envoy to the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) on COVID-19 preparedness, through which he headed Africa's response to the coronavirus disease. With roots in WHO and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Nkengasong is lauded for his research on HIV/AIDS; his doctoral research was the first to characterize all genetic subtypes of HIV in Africa. In addition, he is a prolific author on HIV diagnosis, pathogenesis and drug resistance, having penned over 250 peer-reviewed articles in international journals. He was coined a modern-day hero by TIME magazine on their list of the 100 most influential people of 2021.
Malala Yousafzai: Yousafzai is the world's youngest Nobel Prize laureate, having received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 at the age of 17. Recognized as a staunch activist for the education of women and human rights, she anonymously chronicled her young life in the Swat Valley of Pakistan under Taliban rule on a BBC Urdu blog during the First Battle of Swat in 2009. In the enduring years, she was interviewed extensively in print and on television, placing her advocacy for educational rights, and her opposition of Taliban restrictions on education, in the spotlight. On October 9, 2012, Yousafzai was shot by a Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan gunman in an assassination attempt — an experience through which she miraculously survived. The event ignited an outpouring of support for Yousafzai, and Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan was condemned by government officials and human rights organizations worldwide. Following her recovery in 2013, Yousafzai leveraged her status to promote the right to education and co-founded the Malala Fund, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing girls' education, and co-authored the best-selling autobiography, "I Am Malala."
Tim Berners-Lee: Berners-Lee is a computer scientist who is acclaimed for inventing the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989. Currently serving as a professorial fellow of computer science at the University of Oxford and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he is also the director of the World Wide Web Consortium and a co-founder of the World Wide Web Foundation. In his pursuit for technological advancement, he implemented the first successful communication between an HTTP client and server via the internet and, subsequently, published the first website in December 1990. Berners-Lee's laudatory work inventing the WWW has been recognized as the number one cultural moment that shaped the world. In 2016, he earned the ACM Turing Award for his inventions, having previously been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004.
Tsai Ing-wen: Tsai has served as the president of Taiwan since 2016 and is recognized as the first female president of Taiwan. Also serving as chairperson of the Democratic Progressive Party since 2020, and formerly from 2008 to 2012 and again from 2014 to 2018, she is a past vice premier of the Republic of China (Taiwan), past member of the Legislative Yuan and past minister of the Mainland Affairs Council. Tsai earned law degrees from National Taiwan University and Cornell Law School and was also awarded a Doctor of Philosophy in law from the London School of Economics at the University of London. Under her leadership, Taiwan became the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage in 2019. In 2020, Tsai was praised for her proactive response in handling the coronavirus disease months prior to COVID-19 being declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization.

The full World Leaders of Esteem list is organized alphabetically below, by first name:

Adar Poonawalla
Ai Weiwei
Ana Maria Rey
Angela Merkel
Autumn Peltier
Chetna Gala Sinha
Cyril Ramaphosa
Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gytsao)
Desmond Tutu
Dr. Ayesha Khanna
Dr. Krishna Ella
Ed Yong
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
Elliot Page
General Chou Jih-haw
Greta Thunberg
Iman
Jacinda Arden
Jae Kyung Jo
Jane Goodall
John Nkengasong
Leo Varadkar
Ma Huateng (Pony Ma)
Malala Yousafzai
Margrethe Vestager
Masayoshi Miyake
Michael Anton Smith
Naoki Yoshida
Pavle Sicherl
Petra Seidler
Pope Francis
Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex
Richard Branson
Tayo Amusan
Tedros Adhanom Ghabreyesus
Tim Berners-Lee
Tsai Ing-wen
Xi Jinping
Yanis Varoufakis

Marquis Who's Who has also announced the release of its supplemental Maker's List for November: U.S. Immigrant Trailblazers. The list pays homage to immigrants who have migrated to the United States in pursuit of success and, consequently, have served as inspiration for other U.S. immigrants to achieve greatness.

The U.S. Immigrant Trailblazers list includes:

Arianna Huffington: Huffington was born in Athens, Greece, in 1950 and relocated to the United Kingdom at the age of 16 to study economics at Girton College at the University of Cambridge. Following many years in the United Kingdom, Huffington immigrated to the United States in 1980 and became a naturalized American citizen in 1990. Through all her career endeavors, she is pronounced for co-founding The Huffington Post in 2005, a commentary blog and news alternative that is now known as HuffPost. After AOL's acquisition of The Huffington Post in 2011, Huffington became editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group and, in 2012, it became the first commercially run U.S. digital media corporation to win a Pulitzer Prize. Huffington departed from The Huffington Post in 2016 to found Thrive Global, a company that offers behavior change technology. Recognized as a prolific author of 15 books, syndicated columnist and entrepreneur, Huffington was named to Forbes' Most Powerful Women list.
Katalin Karikó: Karikó was born in Szolnok, Hungary, in 1955. Following the receipt of a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Szeged, she served the Institute of Biochemistry, Biological Research Centre of Hungary in research capacities. Though the laboratory lost funding, Karikó continued her ambitions abroad, immigrating to the United States with her husband and daughter in 1985. During this time, she began working with mRNA-based gene therapy while working with the University of Pennsylvania. As her career progressed, she assumed the role of vice president at BioNTech RNA Pharmaceuticals in 2013, becoming senior vice president in 2019. Notably, Karikó's U.S. patents for the application of non-immunogenic, nucleoside-modified RNA were licensed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna to develop their COVID-19 vaccines. She was recently honored with the 2021 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award alongside immunologist Drew Weissman.
Sergey Brin: Brin was born in Moscow, Russia, in 1973 and immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1979. While in the process of obtaining their exit visas, Brin's parents lost their jobs, and the family experienced eight months of hardship prior to their emigration. Thereafter, they lived in Vienna and Paris and received financial assistance from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, thereby jumpstarting the family's immigration to the United States. Resituating himself in America, Brin received a Bachelor of Science from the University of Maryland at 19 years old and, subsequently, enrolled at Stanford University on a National Science Foundation fellowship. While attending Stanford, Brin met Larry Page and, together, they built the first web search engine and founded Google. Now recognized as an entrepreneur, computer scientist and internet aficionado, Brin is a co-founder and past president of Google's parent company, Alphabet, Inc., for which he still serves as controlling shareholder and board member. In 2009, Brin was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, having previously earned the Marconi Foundation Prize, the highest award in engineering, in 2004.

The full U.S. Immigrant Trailblazers list is organized alphabetically below, by first name:

Arianna Huffington
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Christiane Amanpour
David Ho, MD
Dikembe Mutombo
Eduardo Saverin
George Soros
Hamdi Ulukaya
Helen Kim Ho
Jerry Yang
José Ramón Andrés Puerta
Katalin Karikó
Lina Khan
Madeleine Albright
Pierre Morad Omidyar
Sergey Brin
Steve Chen and Jawed Karim
Sundar Pichai
Vinod Dham
Yo-Yo Ma

About Marquis Who's Who®

Since 1899, when A. N. Marquis printed the first edition of Who's Who in America^®, Marquis Who's Who^® has chronicled the lives of the most accomplished individuals and innovators from every significant field of endeavor, including politics, business, medicine, law, education, art, religion, and entertainment. Today, Who's Who in America^® remains an essential biographical source for thousands of researchers, journalists, librarians, and executive search firms around the world. Marquis^® publications may be visited via the official Marquis Who's Who^® website at www.marquiswhoswho.com.

About the Marquis Maker's Lists

The Marquis Maker's Lists seek to highlight, celebrate and recognize those people whose ideas, philosophies, positions, example or standards, talents, gifts or aptitude, discoveries, innovations or breakthroughs have the ability to influence, affect and transform. The selection committee for the Marquis Maker's Lists is comprised of diverse professionals from a variety of backgrounds in publishing, entertainment, law, business, journalism, marketing, graphic design, public relations, and print media. Committee members conduct extensive independent research and analyses to vet candidates relevant to each Maker's List theme. The committee meets routinely to thoughtfully dialogue through individual nominations to determine eligibility for inclusion. Thereafter, a thorough and objective ranking system is utilized and applied by the committee and tabulated by the executive director to confirm, authenticate and finalize each list. The Marquis Maker’s List reserves the right to review and rescind nominations at any time.

Editor’s Note (Revised March 9, 2022): The Maker’s List selection committee has formally withdrawn Vladimir Putin as an honoree from its November 2021 list in light of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and the humanitarian violations committed in relation to this operation.

SOURCE Marquis Who's Who