Mai leads a team of women who were awarded the 2019 Vietnamese Kovalevskaia Award for their successful isolation of a new strain of SARS-CoV-2, making Vietnam one of the first four countries to successfully isolate the virus in 2020. Her team has spent the last two decades fighting deadly diseases, most notably SARS, A/H5N1 bird flu and H1N1.

(Photo: Sức Khỏe & Dời Sống)