When I applied to graduate school, like many students, I thought I would continue working on the same thing I had worked on as an undergraduate. I thought, I absolutely want to work on how bacteria talk to each other, which is still a fascinating problem by the way. However, I got to graduate school, and of course I realized immediately that there were many, many very interesting problems going on, being run by lots of fascinating people. So, I had the opportunity to work with several different scientists when I first got to Harvard as a part of the rotation projects that we did during the first year and one of my rotations was with Jack Szostak, who explained to me that he was studying the origin of life, that he really wanted to figure out how it was that life might have gotten started on the planet from a chemical perspective.

How did the first genetic material evolve? And the idea that was kind of new in the field at the time was that RNA might have been the original genetic material because scientists had just discovered, this was work that was done by Tom Cech and Sidney Altman and several others, that showed that RNA could be a catalytic molecule, it could carry out chemical reactions. And so, the project that Jack Szostak was starting to work on at that time was to test that hypothesis in the lab to really ask, could RNA be capable of making copies of itself? And I just found that question so incredibly interesting that I immediately thought, well, I have to work on that.

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.