When I was growing up I loved to ask questions, but I often asked them of myself. I went to the public library multiple times a week and in those days there was no Google, there was no looking things up online, there were no PDFs. You had to actually go and pull books off the shelf and there was the Dewey Decimal System, probably nobody remembers that anymore. Anyway, so I spent a lot of afternoons looking things up in the library and trying to find out information. So again, this was my first exposure to the fields of biology and chemistry and material science. I was also fascinated by materials because of the energy crisis that happened in the early seventies and in Hawaii there was a big push at that time to develop geothermal energy and solar energy. And so, I found myself wondering, how do you make devices that can harvest sunlight and trying to learn about that. So, I found it really exciting to have an idea and wonder about something and then be able to go look up information about it.

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.