Jennifer Doudna, the Li Ka Shing Professor of Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research and Umeå University in Sweden are sharing the 2015 Gruber Genetics Prize. The prize, awarded by the Gruber Foundation at Yale University, comes with a $500,000 award.
The two women are being honored for harnessing an ancient mechanism of bacterial immunity into a powerful and general technology for editing genomes, with wide-ranging implications across biology and medicine. The two scholars will be honored in Baltimore on October 9 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics.
Dr. Doudna is a graduate of Pomona College in Claremont, California. She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
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.