I ended up at Pomona College for my undergraduate work, because it is a small liberal arts college. My parents were absolutely adamant that that was the kind of place where I was going to go to college. They had both been undergraduates at Oberlin College in Ohio. They would've loved me to go to Oberlin, but I said Ohio, I think it's cold there in the wintertime. So, I didn't apply to Oberlin, but they really wanted me to go for the liberal arts experience.

When I was in high school, I really had this idea that I wanted to become a biochemist. I didn't even really know what that was, but I knew that I was fascinated by the possibility that you could understand biological phenomena at a chemical level. That's what I really wanted to do. And so, the question was how to do that, where to do that? So, I was applying to colleges in around 1980 or so. 1981, I graduated high school. And in those days, there weren't very many undergraduate programs that had a biochemistry focus, but Pomona did and they did partly because they had a very strong chemistry department. They had, also, a very good program in physics and biology, the STEM fields, mathematics, and so they were starting a new track in biochemistry and they had just hired their first professor of biochemistry. So, I was attracted to apply there partly because they had that focus.

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.