When I got into the lab, even in college, actually, I found that I did have a natural aptitude for bench work. And it was on several levels because in science, when you're doing experimental science, you have to have patience, you have to have perseverance, you have to be willing to just try things. There's not necessarily going to be a cookbook procedure to follow. You have to be willing to just experiment, really. And I loved all of that. I just did. I found myself, I can still remember it, when I was working in my biochemistry professor's lab in college that I couldn't wait to get to the lab every day and I'd get out of bed and I couldn't wait to get to the lab because I wanted to find out what happened to that experiment I did yesterday. And sometimes, disappointments, things wouldn't work, but sometimes they did. And when they did, you felt really motivated to then do the next thing. So, I think I've always had that natural inclination towards experimental science, that you don't know if you have it until you try, but for me, that's just been a natural fit.

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.