Jennifer Doudna, the Li Ka Shing Professor of Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Emmanuelle Charpentier, the Alexander von Humboldt Professor and director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, are sharing the 2016 Tang Prize in Biopharmaceutical Science from Academia Sinica, the top research institution in Taiwan. They will share the prize with a third scholar, Feng Zhang. He is an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Professors Doudna and Charpentier 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. This is only the second time the Tang Prize in Biopharmaceutical Science has been given out. The three winners will receive a medal and share a $1.24 million prize and a grant of $311,000 for research.
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.