Rudolf Stefan Jan Weigl (2 September 1883 – 11 August 1957) was a Polish biologist, physician and inventor, known for creating the first effective vaccine against epidemic typhus.

[1] Weigl worked during the Holocaust to save the lives of countless Jews by developing the vaccine for typhus and providing shelter to protect those suffering under the Nazi Germans in occupied Poland.

Weigl was born in Prerau, which at the time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to Austrian parents, of Austro-Moravian descent.

[4] Although he was a native German speaker, when the family moved to Poland, he adopted the Polish language and culture.

[4] After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Weigl was drafted into the medical service of the Austro-Hungarian army and began research on typhus and its causes.

[4] Weigl worked at a military hospital in Przemyśl, where he supervised the Laboratory for the Study of Spotted Typhus from 1918 to 1920.

Many of his Jewish associates primarily helped grow the lice and in return, they received food, protection, and doses of the vaccine when it was fully developed.

He discovered that a vaccine could be developed from lice stomachs infected with Rickettsia prowazeki, the causative agent of typhus in humans.

He refined this technique over the years until 1933 when he performed large-scale testing to cultivate bacteria and experiment with the lice using a micro-infection strategy.

He alleviated this problem by vaccinating the human "injectees", which successfully protected them from death (though some did develop the disease).

This award was given by Israel and commemorated his work for saving countless Jewish lives during World War II.