When I arrived to start my postdoc, I didn't know anything about X-ray crystallography except what I was reading and I had never crystallized RNA, nor had anyone else by the way, so that was sort of figuring out how to think about that problem. And, again, I loved it. I do remember feeling a lot of angst at various moments in that project, as you might appreciate, because it really was so new at the time that it wasn't entirely clear that it would even be possible to crystallize RNA.

Tom's lab is in Boulder, Colorado. I arrived there, and this was in the early nineties, Boulder had just hired, really with Tom's supervision, a pair of two very good young crystallographers. Both of them were doing protein crystallography and so, we had a lot of opportunity to learn from the two of them about the mechanics of doing X-ray crystallography, so that was great. And beyond that, I was just reading and trying to think about the principles of crystallization that might allow us to actually generate crystals of RNA, but there were no guarantees. I mean, it was really, literally just trying things and trying to figure out would this 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.