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Jennifer A. Doudna holds the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair in Biomedical and Health Sciences and serves as Professor of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Structural Biology in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. A leading researcher in Biology, her work centers on RNA biology, including the structure and function of RNA molecules that act as enzymes or interact with proteins. She earned a B.A. from Pomona College in 1985, graduating as the top student in chemistry, and a Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology from Harvard Medical School in 1989 under Jack Szostak. Doudna conducted postdoctoral research with Szostak at Harvard and Thomas Cech at the University of Colorado Boulder from 1989 to 1994. She joined Yale University as an assistant professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry in 1994, advancing to associate professor and then full professor, and was appointed a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 1997. In 2002, she moved to UC Berkeley as a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, also serving as a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and senior investigator at Gladstone Institutes.
Doudna's career highlights include determining the crystal structure of a group I ribozyme domain, published in Science in 1996, and elucidating the Dicer enzyme structure involved in RNA interference. In collaboration with Emmanuelle Charpentier, she co-developed the CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing system, described in their 2012 Science paper titled 'A Programmable Dual-RNA–Guided DNA Endonuclease in Adaptive Bacterial Immunity.' This breakthrough has transformed genome editing applications in research, medicine, agriculture, and beyond. She founded the Innovative Genomics Institute in 2014 to advance CRISPR technologies ethically and co-founded companies such as Caribou Biosciences, Editas Medicine, and Mammoth Biosciences. Doudna has received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with Charpentier), 2020 Wolf Prize in Medicine, 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, 2016 Japan Prize, 2018 Kavli Prize, 2019 LUI Che Woo Prize, 2025 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, and 2026 Priestley Medal from the American Chemical Society. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2002), National Academy of Medicine, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Royal Society, and Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Her contributions extend to public discussions on genome editing ethics and COVID-19 diagnostic development using CRISPR.
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