It was very disruptive to become parents. It was very disruptive, no question. It changed everything. It changed the way we did our work, in the sense that the workday became very defined. Before my son was born, I would do a lot of work at night or reading and things like that. Suddenly, that time was just gone because I really had to spend it with my son and I had to figure out how to manage that and how to rearrange my schedule. One thing that we did, and I'm really happy about this actually, is that we made a decision very early on that we would just include our son in a lot of our work. So, for example, I used to take my son to work with me, even when he was very young. I would take him, he would be in the office and he'd be in a little bassinet or something, and he'd

If I was nursing him, I would take time to do that. And then later, when he was a little bit older, we would bring him into the laboratory sometimes on weekends if we were doing things, talking to people, so he would see the activity going on in the lab. We also took him on a lot of trips where we were attending scientific meetings, including here at Cold Spring Harbor, and our son would just come along. Often, in those days, my mother would sometimes travel with us and she would do the daycare with our son while we went to the meeting. It was a great way for our son to see us doing our work and that that was very normal. It was normal for a woman, his mom, to be a professional and to be going to meetings and presenting work, so that was never odd to him. There was just something that, yeah, of course that's what you're doing. So, I felt like that was one important way that we could educate him about our values and the way that we wanted to have our family be clearly prioritized, but at the same time, including him in our professional work.

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.