Jennifer Doudna

Jennifer Doudna ForMemRS
Doudna in 2023
Born	(1964-02-19) February 19, 1964 (age 60) Washington, D.C., U.S.
Education	Pomona College (BA) Harvard University (MA, PhD)
Known for	First X-ray based structure of catalytic RNA RNA interference CRISPR
Spouse	Jamie Cate
Awards	Alan T. Waterman Award (2000) Jacob Heskel Gabbay Award (2014) Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2015) Princess of Asturias Award (2015) Tang Prize in Biopharmaceutical Science (2016) Japan Prize (2017) Kavli Prize in Nanoscience (2018) Wolf Prize in Medicine (2020) Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2020) Full list
Scientific career
Fields	Biochemistry CRISPR RNA biology Gene editing
Institutions	University of Colorado, Boulder Yale University University of California, Berkeley Gladstone Institutes University of California, San Francisco
Thesis	Towards the Design of an RNA Replicase (1989)
Doctoral advisor	Jack Szostak
Other academic advisors	Thomas Cech
Doctoral students	Rachel Haurwitz Janice Chen Lei Stanley Qi Basem Al-Shayeb
Website	Doudna Lab website Hughes Institute website

Jennifer Anne Doudna ForMemRS (/ˈdaʊdnə/;^[1] born February 19, 1964)^[2] is an American biochemist 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. She received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with Emmanuelle Charpentier, "for the development of a method for genome editing."^[3][4] 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. She has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1997.^[5]

Doudna graduated from Pomona College in 1985 and earned a Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1989. 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.^[6] 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).^{[7][8][9][10]}

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,^[11][12] which has been called one of the most significant discoveries in the history of biology.^[13] 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.^[11]

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^[14] and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology, with Charpentier.^[15] She has been a co-recipient of the Gruber Prize in Genetics (2015),^[16] the Tang Prize (2016),^[17] the Canada Gairdner International Award (2016),^[18] and the Japan Prize (2017).^[19] She was named one of the Time 100 most influential people in 2015,^[20] and in 2023 was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.^[21]