Stéphane Bancel (born July 20, 1972) is a French billionaire businessman. He is the

chief executive officer A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especial ...

(CEO) of the American pharmaceutical and biotechnology company

Moderna Moderna, Inc. ( ) is an American pharmaceutical and biotechnology company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that focuses on RNA therapeutics, primarily mRNA vaccines. These vaccines use a copy of a molecule called messenger RNA (mRNA) to pro ...

, known for its COVID-19 vaccine. Before joining Moderna, Bancel was the CEO of French diagnostics company

BioMérieux bioMérieux SA is a French multinational biotechnology company founded and headquartered in Marcy-l'Étoile, France, close to Lyon. bioMérieux is present in 44 countries and serves more than 160 countries through a large network of distributor ...

. Bancel is a partner at Flagship Pioneering, and has served on the boards of Indigo Agriculture, Boston's Museum of Science, and

Qiagen QIAGEN N.V., the global corporate headquarter of the QIAGEN group, is located in Venlo, The Netherlands. Furthermore, European, American, and Asia regional headquarters are located in respectively Hilden, Germany, Maryland United States, and Sh ...

. As of December 2022, his net worth was estimated at US$6 billion, owning about 8% of Moderna.

Early life

Bancel was born in

Marseille Marseille ( , , ; also spelled in English as Marseilles; oc, Marselha ) is the prefecture of the French department of Bouches-du-Rhône and capital of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region. Situated in the camargue region of southern Fra ...

, France. His father and mother were an engineer and doctor, respectively. He enjoyed computers, math, and science during his childhood. Bancel studied engineering at

CentraleSupélec CentraleSupélec (CS) is a top French graduate engineering school of Paris-Saclay University in Gif-sur-Yvette, France. It was established on 1 January 2015, as a result of a strategic merger between two prestigious grandes écoles in France, ...

(former École Centrale Paris) and biological engineering at the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public land-grant research university in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. ...

, earning master's degrees at both institutions. He went on to earn an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Career

Bancel was a sales director at Eli Lilly and Company, eventually becoming head of operations for Belgium. In 2007, he became CEO of French diagnostics company

, and was credited with improving the company's margins. In 2011, Bancel joined

as the CEO.

Stat STAT, Stat. , or stat may refer to: * Stat (system call), a Unix system call that returns file attributes of an inode * ''Stat'' (TV series), an American sitcom that aired in 1991 * Stat (website), a health-oriented news website * STAT protein, a ...

reported that Bancel led a highly secretive culture with little outside review of its science or research.

Personal life

Bancel has two children. In April 2020, with the Moderna share price rising on news of imminent phase 2 human trials for its potential

COVID-19 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by a virus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first known case was identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. The disease quickly ...

vaccine, Bancel's stake of about 9% became worth over $1 billion. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

References

French billionaires 1972 births Living people École Centrale Paris alumni University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering alumni Harvard Business School alumni Paris-Saclay University alumni 21st-century French businesspeople French chief executives Moderna people {{France-business-bio-stub