By: BHS Features Staff
March 15, 2023
Jennifer Anne Doudna is an American biochemist who has laid much of the foundation for today’s work in CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) gene editing. She is also one of the first women to share a Nobel Prize in the sciences, and she continues to break the stigma for women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics).
Jennifer Doudna was born on February 19, 1964, in Washington D.C. At the age of seven, her family moved to Hilo, Hawaii, where she spent most of her youth. She states much of her curiosity comes from the beautiful island itself. Doudna was fascinated by the beauty of the island, and nature built her sense of curiosity and her desire to understand the biology of life.
Her love for gene science began in the sixth grade after her father gave her a copy of James Watson’s 1968 book, The Double Helix, on the discovery of DNA. Even though she was told that “Women don’t go into science,” she knew that she wanted to be a scientist, no matter the challenge.
From grades K-12, Doudna attended Hilo School in Wailuku, Hawaii, where she graduated in 1981. She then went on to attend Pomona College and later transferred to Harvard Medical School, in which she earned her Ph.D. in 1989 in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology.
After receiving her Ph.D., she conducted research fellowships in Molecular Biology at the Massachusetts General Hospital and in Genetics at Harvard Medical School. From 1991-1994, she was a Lucille P. Markey Postdoctoral Scholar in Biomedical Science at The University of Colorado (Boulder), where she worked with American chemist, Thomas Cech.
The University of Colorado is also where she met her husband Jamie Cate who at the time was also studying Biochemistry. They had instant “chemistry” and bonded over their love for science. They later married in 2000 and went on to have a son (Andrew) in 2002.
Doudna has received numerous awards for her breakthroughs in science. She was a Searle Scholar and received the 1996 Beckman Young Investigators Award. In 2000, she was awarded the Alan T. Waterman Award, which is the National Science Foundation’s highest honor that annually recognizes an outstanding researcher under the age of 35. In 2001, she received the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry from the American Chemical Society.
Jennifer Doudna is a leader for all women and girls who are interested in STEM. Because she is a woman, she was told by many that she could never work in the science and medical fields. By the age of 25, she proved everyone wrong.
Simply, she is an inspiration to all women and girls across the world.
{Information for this article can be found at Berkeley Research and Wikipedia.}
THE RETURN OF THE EYE 