One of my favorite stories is about my high school AP English teacher, Bob Hillier. Not a scientist, but by that point he knew that I was not intending to go on in the humanities in college. I really wanted to pursue my interest in biological chemistry, but he was very supportive of that and he was somebody who was always looking for ways to make literature more accessible to high school kids, and he was very good at it. He was also the coach of the cross country team and he was always trying to get me to run cross country, but I disappointed him because I played soccer instead, I went out for varsity soccer. He was somebody who just continually would push us kids to think about how to explore ideas we were excited about and to learn from our mistakes, he really wanted us to do creative work.

We would have to write various papers on books we were reading and he really wanted us to think about what we were reading in a new way. It was a different way to interpret it than maybe what is sort of the standard and I've always remembered that because I feel that that's something important in science too. That when we're working as scientists, it's very easy to get into a mode of thinking, especially as we get older and we've been doing science for a while, like me, you get into a way of thinking about things and every now and then it's really good to step back and say, wait a minute, is there a different way to approach this? And as a person who now has the good fortune of working with lots of young students that come to the lab, it's a real pleasure to see that they often have a fresh take on a problem or a question. And I think that's kind of the principle that my high school teacher was trying to teach to us, is that it's good to take a step back and look at things in a new way.

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.