When my family moved to Hawaii in 1971 and we moved to the town of Hilo, I was definitely in both a cultural and an ethnic minority. There were not very many people who were white, who were Caucasian. We were called haoles – and that means, it's kind of a derogatory word, it's sort of “foreigner”. I wasn't aware of any of that as a kid, any of the background to that, why would people who had lived in Hawaii for generations resent haoles coming in? Why would they resent that? They clearly did, but I had no context to try to interpret that. What I experienced as a kid in school was just a lot of name-calling and bullying and, we would call it today harassment, that was hard to understand and did I feel as an outsider? Absolutely. I felt very much to be an outsider. And it was hard, if I'm honest.

It was not the kind of bucolic vision of Hawaii that people have when they visit as a tourist. It was very different to kind of be dropped into that cultural experience, but I think what happened was that it made me resilient. It made me have to trust myself. It made me have to figure out how to make my way in that culture. It also made me much more aware of what it feels like to be an outsider and what it feels like for people to make judgments about you based on how you look, not based on anything else and I think that's made me a better person in the long run.

Dr. Jennifer Doudna is a biochemist and 2020 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry. She is also the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair in Biomedical and Health sciences as well as a professor of biochemistry, biophysics, and structural biology. Her work focuses on RNA interference and gene editing.

In 1985, she earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in biochemistry from Pomona College and in 1989 received her PhD in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology from Harvard Medical School. From 1991 to 1994, she was a Lucille P. Markey post-doctoral scholar in Biomedical science at the University of Colorado Boulder. She also received fellowships from the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

From 1994 to 2001, Dr. Doudna was an associate professor and full professor at Yale University. In 2002, Dr. Douda accepted a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology position at the University of California, Berkeley. She has also been researching with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1997, and her work with CRISPR-Cas9 and other genome-engineering techniques has led to breakthroughs in human and agricultural genomics research. At the Doudna Lab, researchers focus on determining mechanisms of novel genome editing tools for in vitro usage in plants and mammals as well as anti-CRISPR agents.

Dr. Doudna has received numerous awards for her work including the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing a method for genome editing, the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the 2016 Japan Prize, the 2019 Welfare Betterment Prize, the 2020 Wolf Prize in Medicine, and the 2025 National Medal of Technology and Innovation. She is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Inventors, and a member of the Royal Society.