The way I run my lab is very hands-off. I'm a believer in hiring great people and building a really good network in the lab of interactions, and then allowing that to develop organically for ideas to percolate in that group and for people to explore them in ways that they're interested in. This has evolved for me over the years. When I first started my lab, I was much, much more hands-on and involved in the research very directly myself. I was actually working in the bench in those days. That hasn't happened now for a while, but now I feel my role is more helping people think about strategy, thinking about what are the important problems that we should be going after. Is this problem worth studying? And if it is, what's the best way to try to approach it?

I often, I think much more than I did when I first started my lab, have become aware that people come to science from all different backgrounds and every person has a unique set of skills, things that they're particularly good at. So, what I try to do for each person that comes to my lab, is to get to know them and figure out what are their skills, what are their passions, what do they enjoy doing, what are they really good at doing, who do they like working with, and then I try to help them to really use all of those qualities that they have to do extraordinary science. If I achieve that, then I've done my job.

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.