When I was young, I was a bit of a tomboy. I had a horse growing up, I went to 4H and liked to ride my horse with my friends. I often played kickball in the street with the other boys in the neighborhood. I was adventurous, but also a bit of a loner I would say. I wasn't a natural extrovert at all. I was somebody who liked to read and I was fascinated by ideas. There was a lot of discussion about writers in my family. My father was a professor of American literature, so lots of discussions of Emerson and Blake and Henry David Thoreau and writers like that. So it was an unusual childhood in the sense that I had a very intellectual family, but I was in a place that was not particularly intellectually inclined. Many of my friends were from military families, were from working-class families. They were people who were really dedicated to our town of Hilo and many of them had grown up in Hawaii originally. So, it was a fascinating juxtaposition of cultures for me.

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.