Jennifer Doudna

Jennifer Anne Doudna shortly named Jennifer Doudna is an American biochemist. She is famous for her pioneering work in CRISPR gene editing, for which she was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Emmanuelle Charpentier. She co-founded and serves on the advisory panel of multiple companies that use CRISPR technology in unique ways, including Inari, Synthego, Mammoth Biosciences, and Caribou Biosciences. She has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) since 1997, and since 2018 she holds the position of the senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes. She is a Li Ka Shing Chancellor Chair Professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been named one of the Time 100 most influential people in 2015 (with Charpentier), and she was listed as a runner-up for Time Person of the Year in 2016 alongside other CRISPR researchers.

Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, co-inventors of the groundbreaking CRISPR gene editing technique, have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The award is shared by Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for creating precise genome-editing technology. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded this year to two scientists who pioneered the groundbreaking gene-editing technology. The Nobel Committee’s decision to reward Emmanuelle Charpentier, now at the Max Planck Unit for the Study of Pathogens in Berlin, and Jennifer Doudna, of the University of California, Berkeley, for their work developing the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tools puts an end to years of uncertainty over who will be honoured. Since its introduction in the 2010s, the technology has swept through laboratories all over the world, enabling precise genome edits. It has a wide range of applications: scientists expect to use it to modify human genes to eradicate diseases, create hardier plants, eradicate pathogens, and more. Doudna was “really sound asleep” when her phone rang, and she answered it to find a call from a Nature reporter breaking the news. “I grew up in a small town in Hawaii and would have never imagined this happening in a million years,” says Doudna. “I’m totally taken aback, I’m completely taken aback.”

An American biochemist, she is well-known.

For her groundbreaking work in the field of CRISPR gene editing.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the Alan T. Waterman Award, the Jacob Heskel Gabbay Award, the Breakthrough

Prize in Life Sciences, and other honors have been bestowed upon him.

Jennifer Doudna was born in Washington, D.C., on February 19, 1964. Hilo, Hawaii is her birthplace. Jennifer Anne Doudna is her actual name and full name. Her nationality is American, and her race is American-White. Her race is White. As of 2020, she celebrated her 56th birthday. Dorothy Jane (Williams) (mother) and Martin Kirk Doudna (father) were her parents when she was born (father). Her father earned a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Michigan, and her mother, who stayed at home with her children, had a master’s degree in education. Her family moved to Hawaii when she was seven years old because her father accepted a job as an American literature professor at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. Her mother went on to receive a second master’s degree in Asian history from the university and taught history at a community college in the region. Her zodiac sign is Pisces, and she follows the Christian faith.

She became interested in science and mathematics when she was in school. He gave her a copy of James Watson’s 1968 book “The Double Helix,” about the discovery of the structure of DNA, when she was in sixth grade. Miss Wong, a chemistry teacher at Hilo High School, had a major influence on her. In the year 1981, she graduated from Hilo High School. She went to Pomona College in Claremont, California, to study biochemistry after high school. Professor Sharon Panasenko’s lab was where she began her first scientific experiments. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry in 1985. She chose Harvard Medical School for her doctoral studies and graduated in 1989 with a Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology. She worked with Thomas Cech as a Lucille P. Markey Postdoctoral Scholar in Biomedical Science at the University of Colorado Boulder from 1991 to 1994.

Jennifer Doudna’s Career: How Was It?

Jennifer Doudna started her scientific career by studying the structure and biological function of RNA enzymes, also known as ribozymes.

She later re-engineered the self-splicing Tetrahymena Group I catalytic intron into a genuine catalytic ribozyme capable of copying RNA templates.

She then went to Thomas Cech’s lab at the University of Colorado Boulder to crystallize and establish the three-dimensional structure of a ribozyme for the first time, allowing the structure of ribozymes to be compared to that of enzymes, or catalytic proteins.

She started her project in the Cech lab in 1991 and finished it in the Yale University lab in 1996.

In 1994, she became an assistant professor in Yale’s Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry.

Her team was able to crystallize and solve the three-dimensional structure of the Tetrahymena Group I ribozyme’s catalytic center there.

Jamie Cate, one of her early graduate students and later her husband, wanted to soak the crystals in the heavy metal derivative osmium hexamine to mimic magnesium, and they were able to solve the structure, the first solved ribozyme structure and the second solved folded RNA structure, using this technique (the first being tRNA).

She was promoted to Henry Ford II Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale in the year 2000.
Between 2000 and 2001, she was the Robert Burns Woodward Visiting Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University.

She accepted a position as a Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, where her husband Jamie Cate was also a professor. It was the year 2002 at the time.

In 2009, she took a leave of absence from Berkeley to work at Genentech as the director of discovery science, but she only stayed for two months.

She is currently the director of the Innovative Genomics Institute (a joint center of UC Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco), holds the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Professorship in Biomedicine and Health, and chairs the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Her lab is now concentrating on gaining a mechanistic understanding of biological processes involving RNA, which is divided into three major areas: the CRISPR method, RNA interference, and translational control through MicroRNAs.

Later in 2012, she and her colleagues made a new discovery that reduces the time and effort needed to edit genomic DNA.

In 2015, she gave a TED Talk about the bioethics of using CRISPR.

The CRISPR method introduced a new, simple way to edit DNA, causing a rush to patent the technique.

Caribou, a company dedicated to commercializing CRISPR technology, was co-founded by her.

She’s also a co-founder of Scribe Therapeutics, which invented CasX, a more lightweight, next-generation Cas9 that cuts DNA efficiently.

She’s also found that the hepatitis C virus uses an unusual system for generating viral proteins.

In 2017, she co-founded Mammoth Biosciences, a bioengineering software startup based in San Francisco. Initial investment totaled $23 million, with a series B round expected to raise $45 million in 2020, with the aim of improving access to biosensing tests that resolve “challenges in healthcare, agriculture, environmental monitoring, biodefense, and more.”

She is currently the director of a COVID-19 research facility that handles over 1000 patient samples per day.

Mammoth Biosciences announced the peer-reviewed validation of a rapid, CRISPR-based point-of-need COVID-19 diagnostic that is quicker and cheaper than qRT-PCR-based tests.

Jennifer Doudna’s Awards and Achievements

Jennifer Doudna is an award-winning woman and she has received many awards till now. She received the 1996 Beckman Young Investigators Award. Additionally, she was awarded the Alan T. Waterman Award, the National Science Foundation’s highest honor that annually recognizes an outstanding researcher under the age of 35, for her structure determination of a ribozyme in the year 2000. She next received the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry of the American Chemical Society in the year 2001. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003, the National Academy of Medicine in 2010, and the National Academy of Inventors in 2014. She received the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for her contributions to CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing technology in the year 2015. She received the Canada Gairdner International Award in the year 2016 along with the Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics in the same year. Not only this but also she has also been a co-recipient of the Gruber Prize in Genetics (2015), the Tang Prize (2016), the Japan Prize, and the Albany Medical Center Prize (2017). In the year 2017, she was awarded the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In the year 2018, she was awarded the NAS Award in Chemical Sciences, the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize from the Rockefeller University, and a Medal of Honor from the American Cancer Society. In the year 2019, she received the Harvey Prize of the Technion/Israel for the year 2018 (jointly with Emmanuelle Charpentier and Feng Zhang) and the LUI Che Woo Prize in the category of Welfare Betterment. Recently, she received the Wolf Prize in Medicine (jointly with Emmanuelle Charpentier) in the year 2020. Also in the same year, Doudna and Charpentier were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020.

Who is Jennifer Doudna Married to?

Jennifer Doudna is a married woman. She is married to her handsome husband, Jamie Cate. As a postdoctoral student at the University of Colorado Doudna met Jamie Cate, then a graduate student; they worked together on the project to crystallize and determine the structure of the Tetrahymena Group I intron P4-P6 catalytic region. They married when she was teaching at Yale, and they both accepted faculty positions at UC Berkeley and moved there. Regarding her husband’s profession, he is currently a UC Berkeley professor and works on gene-editing yeast to increase their cellulose fermentation for biofuel production. The duo is also blessed with a son named Andrew in the year 2003. Doudna sees her son as her ‘biggest experiment’. As of today, the couple is enjoying their present life happily without any disturbances. Her sexual orientation is straight.

How much is Jennifer Doudna’s Net Worth?

A leader in the CRISPR revolution, Jennifer Doudna co-invented with Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier the ability to edit DNA in all organisms using the CRISPR-Cas9 protein. As of 2020, the exact details about her net worth are still to get unfold yet but there is no doubt in the mind of her followers that she is having a net worth and salary in millions. Her major source of wealth comes from a biochemist career. She is enjoying her present life a lot and she is living a cool lifestyle with her career earnings.

How tall is Jennifer Doudna?

Jennifer Doudna is a very beautiful woman with a sweet smile on her face. She has got a very glowing face with a slim body build. She stands tall at the perfect height matching with his body weight. Her eye color is light brown and her hair color is salt and pepper. She maintains her body a lot and at present, she has got a healthy body. Her other body details such as waist size, bra size, shoe size, dress size, and more are still to get revealed yet.