Jennifer Doudna

Jennifer Doudna, born February 19, 1964, in Washington, D.C., is an American biochemist best known for her foundational work on CRISPR gene editing. She shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Emmanuelle Charpentier for developing a method to edit genomes. Doudna holds the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair Professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, and has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 1997. In 2012, she and Charpentier first proposed that CRISPR-Cas9—bacterial enzymes involved in microbial immunity—could be used to programmably edit genomes, a breakthrough often called one of biology’s most significant. This kicked off what is known as the “CRISPR revolution,” with Doudna as a leading figure.

Her early life was shaped by a move to Hilo, Hawaii, when she was seven, after her father took a teaching job at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. Her mother, who held a master’s in education, later earned a second master’s in Asian history and taught at a community college. Doudna’s fascination with local flora and fauna, along with her father’s popular science books, sparked her curiosity. In sixth grade, he gave her James Watson’s *The Double Helix*, a major inspiration. At Hilo High School, her 10th-grade chemistry teacher, Jeanette Wong, and a visiting lecturer on cancer cells encouraged her science career. She spent a summer in mycologist Don Hemmes’s lab at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, graduating in 1981.

Doudna studied biochemistry at Pomona College in Claremont, California. During her freshman year, she doubted her ability to pursue science and considered switching to French, but her French teacher advised her to stay. Chemistry professors Fred Grieman and Corwin Hansch influenced her, and she began research in Sharon Panasenko’s lab. She earned a BA in biochemistry in 1985, then a PhD in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology from Harvard Medical School in 1989, supervised by Jack W. Szostak, on a system that boosted a self-replicating catalytic RNA’s efficiency.

After her PhD, she held research fellowships at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. From 1991 to 1994, she was a Lucille P. Markey Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder, working with Thomas Cech. As of 2025, her h-index is 166 on Google Scholar and 134 on Scopus. Early in her career, Doudna focused on RNA enzymes (ribozymes). In Szostak’s lab, she re-engineered a self-splicing Tetrahymena Group I intron into a true catalytic ribozyme that copied RNA templates. Realizing that not seeing ribozyme molecular mechanisms was a problem, she went to Cech’s lab to crystallize and determine the first three-dimensional structure of a ribozyme, starting in 1991 and finishing at Yale University in 1996. She joined Yale’s Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry as an assistant professor in 1994.

At Yale, her group crystallized and solved the structure of the Tetrahymena Group I ribozyme’s catalytic core, showing five magnesium ions clustered in one region of the P4-P6 domain, forming a hydrophobic core around which the rest folded—analogous to, but chemically distinct from, protein hydrophobic cores. They also crystallized other ribozymes, like the Hepatitis Delta Virus ribozyme. This work led to further structural studies.

Doudna’s awards include the 2000 Alan T. Waterman Award for her ribozyme structure research via X-ray crystallography, and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences with Charpentier for CRISPR-Cas9. She has co-received the Gruber Prize in Genetics (2015), the Tang Prize (2016), the Canada Gairdner International Award (2016), and the Japan Prize (2017). *Time* named her one of the 100 most influential people in 2015, and she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2023.