Jennifer Doudna, professor of chemistry and professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, will receive the Dickson Prize in Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Professor Doudna will receive a medal and a cash prize and will deliver a lecture at Carnegie Mellon University on January 31.
Professor Doudna is being honored for her groundbreaking research harnessing an ancient mechanism of bacterial immunity into a powerful and general technology for editing genomes, with wide-ranging implications across biology and medicine. Much of her work has been in partnership with Emmanuelle Charpentier, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, Germany.
Dr. Doudna joined the faculty at the University of California Berkeley in 2002. Earlier, she had taught at Yale University. Professor Doudna is a graduate of Pomona College in Claremont, California. She holds a Ph.D. in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology from Harvard Medical School.