Jennifer Doudna

Jennifer Anne Doudna (born February 19, 1964) is an American chemist who has done pioneering work in CRISPR gene editing, and made other fundamental contributions in biochemistry and genetics.

Doudna was one of the first women to share a Nobel in the sciences.

Jennifer Doudna was born February 19, 1964, in Washington, D.C., as the daughter of Dorothy Jane (Williams) and Martin Kirk Doudna.

Her father received his PhD in English literature from the University of Michigan, and her mother held a master's degree in education.

When Doudna was seven years old, the family moved to Hawaii so her father could accept a teaching position in American literature at the University of Hawaii at Hilo.

Doudna's mother earned a second master's degree in Asian history from the university and taught history at a local community college.

Growing up in Hilo, Hawaii, Doudna was fascinated by the environmental beauty of the island and its flora and fauna.

Nature built her sense of curiosity and her desire to understand the underlying biological mechanisms of life.

This was coupled with the atmosphere of intellectual pursuit that her parents encouraged at home.

Her father enjoyed reading about science and filled the home with many books on popular science.

When Doudna was in the sixth grade, he gave her a copy of James Watson's 1968 book on the discovery of the structure of DNA, The Double Helix, which was a major inspiration.

Doudna also developed her interest in science and mathematics in school.

Even though Doudna was told that "Women don't go into science," she knew that she wanted to be a scientist no matter what.

Nothing said to her made her doubt it, Doudna said, "When someone tells me I can't do something and I know that I can, it just makes me more resolved to do it."

She spent a summer working in the University of Hawaii at Hilo lab of noted mycologist Don Hemmes and graduated from Hilo High School in 1981.

Doudna was an undergraduate student at Pomona College in Claremont, California, where she studied biochemistry.

During her freshman year, while taking a course in general chemistry, she questioned her own ability to pursue a career in science, and considered switching her major to French as a sophomore.

However, her French teacher suggested she stick with science.

Chemistry professors Fred Grieman and Corwin Hansch at Pomona had a major impact on her.

She started her first scientific research in the lab of professor Sharon Panasenko.

Doudna graduated from Pomona College in 1985 and earned a Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1989.

She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in biochemistry in 1985.

She chose Harvard Medical School for her doctoral study and earned a PhD in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology in 1989.

Her Ph.D. dissertation was on a system that increased the efficiency of a self-replicating catalytic RNA and was supervised by Jack W. Szostak.

After her PhD, she held research fellowships in molecular biology at the Massachusetts General Hospital and in genetics at Harvard Medical School.

From 1991 to 1994, she was Lucille P. Markey Postdoctoral Scholar in Biomedical Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she worked with Thomas Cech.

, Doudna has an h-index of 141 according to Google Scholar and of 111 according to Scopus.

Early in her scientific career, Doudna worked to uncover the structure and biological function of RNA enzymes or ribozymes.

She has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1997.

Her many other awards and fellowships include the 2000 Alan T. Waterman Award for her research on the structure of a ribozyme, as determined by X-ray crystallography and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology, with Charpentier.

While she attended Hilo High School, Doudna's interest in science was nurtured by her 10th-grade chemistry teacher, Ms. Jeanette Wong, whom she has routinely cited as a significant influence in sparking her nascent scientific curiosity.

A visiting lecturer on cancer cells further encouraged her pursuit of science as a career choice.

In 2012, Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier were the first to propose that CRISPR-Cas9 (enzymes from bacteria that control microbial immunity) could be used for programmable editing of genomes, which has been called one of the most significant discoveries in the history of biology.

Since then, Doudna has been a leading figure in what is referred to as the "CRISPR revolution" for her fundamental work and leadership in developing CRISPR-mediated genome editing.

Apart from her professorship at Berkeley, she is also founder and chair of the governance board of the Innovative Genomics Institute, which she co-founded in 2014.

Doudna is also a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes, and an adjunct professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

She has been a co-recipient of the Gruber Prize in Genetics (2015), the Tang Prize (2016), the Canada Gairdner International Award (2016), and the Japan Prize (2017).

She was named one of the Time 100 most influential people in 2015, and in 2023 was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

She received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with Emmanuelle Charpentier, "for the development of a method for genome editing."

She is the Li Ka Shing Chancellor's Chair Professor in the department of chemistry and the department of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley.