Jennifer Doudna

 

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. 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 grew up in Hilo, Hawaii. She 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 president and chair of the board of the Innovative Genomics Institute, 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).^[6][7][8][9] 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,^[10][11] which has been called one of the most significant discoveries in the history of biology.^[12] 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.^[10]

Dr Jennifer Doudna at the Innovative Genomics Institute

Her many other prestigious awards and fellowships include the 2000 Alan T. Waterman Award for her research on the structure as determined by X-ray crystallography of a ribozyme,^[13] and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology, with Charpentier.^[14] She has been a co-recipient of the Gruber Prize in Genetics (2015),^[15] the Tang Prize (2016),^[16] the Canada Gairdner International Award (2016),^[17] and the Japan Prize (2017).^[18]

Outside the scientific community, she has been named one of the Time 100 most influential people in 2015 (with Charpentier),^[19] and she was listed as a runner-up for Time Person of the Year in 2016 alongside other CRISPR researchers.^[20] In 2017, she was the lead author of A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution,^[10] a rare case of the first-person account of a major scientific breakthrough, aimed at the general public, published shortly after the discovery.  Wikipedia