His family fled Beirut’s civil war in 1975. Noubar Afeyan went on to co-found Moderna.

Noubar Afeyan was 13 when his family left Beirut in a hurry. It was 1975, and Lebanon’s civil war had begun. Today he is the founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering and the board chairman of Moderna, which he co-founded, according to Flagship.

The start. Afeyan was born in Beirut in 1962 to Armenian parents, according to his Flagship biography. In 1975 the family “immigrated in a hurry to Canada, which graciously accepted my family as escapees from the civil war,” he said in an interview published by Flagship.

Starting over. The family settled in Montreal. He finished high school at Loyola High School and studied chemical engineering at McGill University, according to Loyola, which named him to its Hall of Merit in 2018.

The training. He moved to Boston and earned a PhD in biochemical engineering at MIT in 1987. Flagship says he was part of one of the very first groups trained to bring engineering and biology together.

The leap. That same year he started his first company, PerSeptive Biosystems, which made tools for life-science labs. He called it “a big leap of faith” and said that, back then, starting a company “was not the traditional path.” He ran PerSeptive for 10 years, and it grew to $100 million a year in sales, according to Flagship.

The big bet. In 2000 he founded Flagship Pioneering. The firm’s model starts with scientists asking “What if?” and then builds new companies around the answer. Flagship says it has developed more than 100 science companies.

The long shot. One of those companies became Moderna. Few people thought the idea would work, Bloomberg reported on Oct. 27. Bloomberg says Afeyan is still betting on improbable ideas.

The ranking. Forbes named him No. 17 on its list of America’s 250 Greatest Living Optimists, published Oct. 20. Flagship shared the ranking the next day.

Why it matters. Afeyan is also a vocal advocate for what immigrants bring to science. His Flagship biography calls him “a passionate advocate of the contributions of immigrants to economic and scientific progress.”

Company counts and sales figures are Flagship’s own. This is news, not medical or financial advice.