Jennifer Doudna

Jennifer Doudna

Jennifer Anne Doudna is an American biochemist known for her pioneering work in CRISPR gene editing. She was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Emmanuelle Charpentier. She is the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley.

About Jennifer Doudna in brief

Summary Jennifer DoudnaJennifer Anne Doudna is an American biochemist known for her pioneering work in CRISPR gene editing. She was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Emmanuelle Charpentier. She is the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been a co-recipient of the Gruber Prize in Genetics, the Tang Prize, the Canada Gairdner International Award, and the Japan Prize. Outside the scientific community, she has been named one of the Time 100 most influential people in 2015 and was listed as a runner-up for Time Person of the Year in 2016. In 2017 she was the lead author of A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution, a rare case of the first-person account of a major scientific breakthrough, aimed at the general public, published shortly after the discovery. She grew up in Hilo, Hawaii. She graduated from Pomona College in 1985 and earned a Ph. D. from Harvard Medical School in 1989. She spent a summer working in the lab of noted mycologist Don Hemmes at Hilo lab. She started her first scientific research in a lab of Sharon Panasenko. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry in 1985. She studied biochemistry in Claremont, California, where she was an undergraduate student. During her freshman year in general chemistry, she questioned her own ability to pursue a career in science.

She considered switching her major to French as a sophomore, and her French teacher suggested she stick with science as a major. She chose biochemistry and earned her PhD in biochemistry. She worked as a lab assistant in the laboratory of Hc Hc Hemmes, who was a noted scientist in the field of cancer cells. She went on to become a visiting lecturer on cancer cells at University of Hawaii, Hilo. In 2012, she and EmmanuelleCharpentier were the first to propose that CRisPR-Cas9 could be used for programmable editing of genomes, which is now considered one of the most significant discoveries in the history of biology. In 2013, she was named a member of the Board of Trustees of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which she has worked with since 1997. In 2015, she received the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences forCRISPR- Cas9 genome editing technology, with Charpentiers. She also received the 2000 Alan T. Waterman Award for her research on the structure as determined by X-ray crystallography of a ribozyme, and the 2000Alan T. Waterman award for her work on the Structure of a Ribozyme. In 2009, she became a member of the board of the Innovative Genomics Institute. In 2010, she co-founded the Genome Institute of California. In 2011, she served as the president and chair of the board of the Genome Institute of California, and was a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes.