Myhrvold, a 2011 alumnus, was working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he’d been neck-deep in coronavirus research for years before the pandemic brought his work into global significance. His fascination with viruses started young, he said. His dad, Nathan Myhrvold, a 1983 Ph.D. alumnus from Princeton, had told him about Ebola. “I was really fascinated by viruses — how they could make us so sick, but they’re so simple, with so few genes,” he said. “And I’ve always had an interest in technology, so I think it was inevitable that there would be a technology component to the work that I was doing.” In January 2021, Myhrvold joined the department of molecular biology as one of Princeton’s newest COVID-19 experts and part of a growing cohort of researchers who straddle the boundary between fundamental research and groundbreaking technological developments. To read the full story.