Jennifer Doudna

Jennifer Anne Doudna (English: Jennifer Anne Doudna, born February 19, 1964), American biologist, professor of chemistry and biology at the University of California, Berkeley; since 1997, she has also served as a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). She won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with French scientist Emmanuelle Charpentier. Doudna grew up in Hilo, Hawaii. She graduated from Pomona College in 1985 and received her PhD from Harvard Medical School in 1989. In addition to her professorship at UC Berkeley, she is president and chair of the board of directors of the Innovative Genomics Institute, a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institute, and a professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco. In 2012, Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier first proposed that CRISPR-Cas9 (an enzyme from bacteria that controls microbial immunity) can be used for programmable editing of the genome. This has been called one of the most significant discoveries in the history of biology. Since then, Dodner has become a leader in what has been called the "CRISPR revolution" for his fundamental work and leadership in developing CRISPR-mediated genome editing.