Did I have time for dating? I had boyfriends in high school and college, people that I dated, but to be honest with you, I really was pretty interested in my work. And I didn't really think a lot about am I going to have a family or am I going to have children? If I'm honest, in those days, it wasn't a priority for me. It really wasn't. But I had the good fortune when I moved to Boulder, Colorado to meet Jamie Cate in the lab. We were both working in the lab at the time, and we initially had just a professional relationship working together. We worked together on the structure of the intron RNA in the beginning, and then he went off to work on the ribosome structure with Harry Noller in Santa Cruz. We stayed in touch, and then we started dating and we were living on opposite sides of the country, and we ended up getting job offers at a couple of different places. But that was one of the motivators for moving to Berkeley was so that we could be together. We ended up getting married in 2002, or in 2000 and then I had my son in 2002. So that all happened relatively fast, and it was kind of transformative. I think when you meet the right person, your perspective changes. And for me at least, I realized, wow, this is an amazing person that I have a relationship with and it would be really interesting to have a baby with them and be parents together.

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.