Jennifer A. Doudna
American biochemist
Jennifer A. Doudna is an American biochemist who helped pioneer CRISPR gene editing. She shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
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American Born 1964 in Washington, D.C., United States
About Jennifer A. Doudna
Jennifer Anne Doudna was born on February 19, 1964, in Washington D.C. She is an American biochemist whose work has centered on CRISPR gene editing, with further contributions in biochemistry and genetics. In 2012, she and Emmanuelle Charpentier suggested for the first time that CRISPR-Cas9, a set of bacterial enzymes that control microbial immunity, could serve as a tool for programmable genome editing. In 2020 the two shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing a method for genome editing. At the University of California, Berkeley, Doudna holds the Li Ka Shing Chancellor's Chair professorship, and she has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 1997. Her other honors include the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and the 2017 Japan Prize. Her book in our catalog is A Crack in Creation.