I can recall going through experiences at school that I definitely did not share with my parents, partly because I just didn't. I didn't understand it, I didn't really know, I felt it was my fault. I assumed, I think this is very common in kids, things happen and you assume that there's something wrong with me. People are pointing at me because they think that I have flaws. And so, I didn't really know how to express that. I think that I internalized a lot of it and I just had to find ways to face it. I was lucky that I met a friend when we were 11. She's still one of my best friends, we've been friends for a long time, over 50 years.

She was very different from me in certain ways, but we also connected on a very deep level because we both experienced that kind of harassment. Even though she's actually part-Hawaiian believe it or not, her family had been in Hawaii for a long time, but she looked more haole and so she would face harassment and she taught me how to face up to it, to face people that are saying those things and to figure out how to either talk to them or ignore them, if that's the right approach, but sort of ways to manage it. And honestly, I still remember those experiences when, even now, when I face challenges at work or when I see examples of racism going on and you try to figure out, okay, what's the right way to handle that? If somebody is saying something that is clearly racist, is it better to ignore it? Is it better to confront it? And I think these are lessons that I started to learn very early, even though I wasn't thinking about it that way at the time.

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.