Jennifer A. Doudna

Jennifer A. Doudna shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Emmanuelle Charpentier. The prize recognized their development of CRISPR-Cas9 as a programmable genome-editing method.

Doudna and Charpentier's groups published a landmark 2012 Science paper showing that Cas9 could be guided to cut DNA at chosen sequences. That paper helped turn a bacterial immune system into a general gene-editing tool.

Doudna is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and has been associated with the Innovative Genomics Institute. Her work is rooted in RNA biochemistry as well as CRISPR gene editing.

Her CRISPR-Cas9 work made it possible to edit disease-related DNA sequences with guide RNA and Cas9 nuclease. The first CRISPR-based therapies for sickle cell disease reached regulatory approval in the 2020s, more than a decade after the 2012 discovery.