Jennifer Doudna, PhD, is an American biochemist. She earned a PhD in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology from Harvard Medical School in 1989. She held several postdoctoral positions, including spending six years at Yale. While at Yale, her research focused on solving the three-dimensional structure of RNA ribozymes. Following two years at Harvard, she moved to Berkeley, where her research focused on understanding RNA functions via structural and biological methods. In 2011 she met Emmanuelle Charpentier. Together they developed the CRISPR-Cas9 system as a simple gene-editing tool. This discovery reduces the time and work needed to edit genomic DNA. In 2020, Doudna and Charpentier were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this discovery.
