LSIPR 50 2017: Jennifer Doudna

Name: Jennifer Doudna

Organisation: University of California, Berkeley

Position: Chancellor’s chair in biomedical and health sciences

Jennifer Doudna is an inventor on one side of the CRISPR dispute. Doudna is a professor of molecular and cell biology and chemistry at UC, Berkeley, where she holds the Li Ka Shing chancellor’s chair in biomedical and health sciences.

She’s also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and has received numerous honours for her work in CRISPR.

In November 2014, the group led by Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier received the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for “harnessing an ancient mechanism of bacterial immunity into a powerful and general technology for editing genomes, with wide-ranging implications across biology and medicine”.

In 2015, Doudna was named as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world.

Her desire to understand biochemistry on a molecular level led Doudna to study catalytic ribonucleic acid (RNAs) called ribozymes.

She did this first as a graduate student in the laboratory of HHMI investigator Jack Szostak at Harvard University and then as a post-doctorate in the laboratory of Thomas Cech at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Doudna has devoted her scientific career to understanding the function of catalytic and other non-protein-coding RNAs.

She has received numerous honours including the NSF Waterman Award, the FNIH Lurie Prize, the Paul Janssen Award for Biomedical Research, the Gruber Prize in Genetics, the Massry Prize, the Heineken Award, the Gairdner Award, the Nakasone Award, the L’Oral-UNESCO International Prize for Women in Science, and the Japan Prize.