When Jamie and I got married, we hadn't really talked a lot about having children. My recollection is that there was an understanding that we both wanted to be parents, we wanted to have a child. And I was, let's see, I was thirty-six when I got married, so I didn't feel like I had huge amounts of time. And so, I ended up getting pregnant two years later in 2002 and had my son in November of that year. And it was just magical, I mean it was really transformative. I think you hear this from other people that have had kids too, especially if they maybe haven't thought so much about it in the past or it hasn't been a priority for them, and they suddenly realize that this is so incredibly interesting. And as scientists, Jamie and I, we both found that having our son was just a fascinating science project too, in a way.

My son is just wonderful in every way, but it was really very, very interesting to see how a new person develops and their ideas. My son's third word was vacuum, for example, and he's now an engineer. And so even from before he could really talk, you could already see that for him, for whatever reason, his mind was just drawn to machines. He has no interest in biology. He loves machines and how they work and figuring them out and building them, and that's always been his passion. Why is that? I don't know, but it's very interesting.

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.