When I got to college, I was just desperate to get into a lab, a research lab. I thought this would be so fascinating if I could work in an actual lab doing research. It seemed like the epitome of why I would be going to college. I was fortunate that I was actually on a work-study program to pay the bills and, as part of that program, there were a couple of research labs that were advertising for people to come and wash glassware in the lab. And it may sound crazy, but I was just absolutely overjoyed when I got hired into my first lab to basically wash flasks, and there I was, soapy water washing these items of glassware that people had been using to do experiments. And I thought someday maybe somebody will let me actually do the experiments, not wash the glassware.

I ended up all four years that I was there, I was working in labs.

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.