As an internationally renowned professor in the departments of chemistry and molecular and cell biology at University of California, Berkeley, Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues rocked the research world in 2012 by describing a simple way of editing the DNA of any organism using an RNA-guided protein found in bacteria. This technology, called CRISPR-Cas9, has opened the floodgates of possibility for human and non-human applications with huge implications across biology and medicine, agriculture, and climate science.

In 2020, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier. She has received many other honors including the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the Japan Prize, Kavli Prize, the Heineken Prize, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award, he LUI Che Woo Welfare Betterment Prize and the Wolf Prize in Medicine. Doudna’s work led TIME to recognize her as one of the “100 Most Influential People” in 2015.

Doudna is the founder of the Innovative Genomics Institute and is the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair in Biomedical and Health Sciences at University of California, Berkeley. She is also a member of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Gladstone Institutes, National Academy of Sciences, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

A leader in public discussion of the ethical implications of genome editing for human biology and human societies, Doudna advocates for thoughtful approaches to the development of policies around the safe use of CRISPR technology. She co-founded and serves on the advisory panel of several companies using the technology in unique ways.

She is the co-author with Sam Sternberg of “A Crack in Creation,” a personal account of her research and the societal and ethical implications of gene editing.

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