We’ve been doing the TIME 100 list of the world’s most influential people for nearly 20 years. But there has never been a year like this. A year of multiple crises, all over the world, all at once.

And so this year’s list looks far different than any of us could have predicted just six months ago. The TIME 100 has always been a mirror of the world and those who shape it. While you will certainly find people who wield traditional power on this year’s list—heads of state, CEOs, major entertainers—it also includes many extraordinary, lesser-known individuals who seized the moment to save lives, build a movement, lift the spirit, repair the world.

There are, for example, a record number of doctors, nurses and scientists. Among them: German infectious-disease specialist Camilla Rothe, who helped document that this coronavirus could be transmitted by people without symptoms; Chinese researcher Zhang Yongzhen, who mapped in less than 40 hours the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 and was the first to share it publicly; New York nurse Amy O’Sullivan, who treated the first patient to die from COVID-19 in the state, contracted the virus herself and was back at work within a few weeks; and of course Anthony Fauci, who became in many ways America’s doctor.

The list also includes many activists fighting for equality, including Black Lives Matter founders Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, who helped build an international movement for racial justice; and Arussi Unda, a feminist leader who helped spearhead a national strike in Mexico to protest gender violence.

Fifty-four of the people on the list are women, more than ever before. Not only were many of the biggest grassroots movements of the year led by women, so were many of the world’s most effective responses to COVID- 19. As Texas Senator Ted Cruz writes of Tsai Ing-wen, the President of Taiwan, where fewer than a dozen people (out of 23 million residents) have died of the virus, “the virus can be controlled—without emulating China’s drastic policies.”

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As a rule, the TIME 100 focuses on the living, but looming large over this year’s list is the impact of individuals such as Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Tony McDade, whose killings galvanized a reckoning around police brutality and systemic racism;