Jennifer Doudna, the Li Ka Shing Professor of Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, has been selected to receive a 2016 L’Oreal-UNESCO Women in Science Award. The award is given to woman scientists, one from each of five continents. Professor Doudna will be honored at the Sorbonne University Amphitheatre in Paris this coming March. Dr. Doudna is a graduate of Pomona College in Claremont, California. She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
The winner from the European continent is Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research and Umeå University in Sweden. She has collaborated with Professor Doudna on research on technology for editing genomes, with wide-ranging implications across biology and medicine. Dr. Charpentier studied biochemistry and microbiology at the University Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris, France, and obtained a Ph.D. in microbiology at the Pasteur Institute, also in Paris.
Also being honored with L’Oreal-UNESCO Women in Science Awards are Quarraisha Abdool Karim, a professor at the Nelson R. Mandela School of Medicine a the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, Hualan Chen, a professor at the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and Andrea Gamarnik of the Fundacion Instituto Leloir in Buenos, Aires, Argentina.
Also five recipients will receive a prize of 100,000 euros.