When I started my faculty position at Yale, this was in 1994. At that time, we had gotten crystals of the RNA that we were working on, this part of the Group I intron that has some of the essential components required for catalysis, but we hadn't yet solved the structure and so that was done at Yale. So, we got to Yale, with the resources there, and there were quite a few colleagues of mine at Yale who were some of the world's best crystallographers – they hadn't worked on RNA, but they were very aware of the technical requirements to get a project done like that. So, I was really in a great place in terms of learning and continuing to advance this project, and that's where we solved that first structure. And it was so exciting, I still remember calculating the electron density map and seeing the shape of the RNA emerging in front of my eyes on a computer screen and realizing that yes, this idea that we've had for several years about RNA having a three-dimensional shape is actually true.

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.