Jennifer Doudna, a professor of molecular and cell biology and of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, has won the 2020 Wolf Prize in Medicine, a prestigious international prize awarded in Israel for unique contributions to humanity. Professor Doudna shares the prize with colleague Emmanuelle Charpentier, director of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, Germany. The two women were 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 Wolf Foundation cited their work as “transformative technology that has the potential to eradicate previously incurable diseases and revolutionize the fields of genetics, molecular biology, and medicine.”
The awards ceremony for the winners will be held on June 11, 2020, at the Knesset residence, hosted by the Israeli president and the Minister of Education. Dr. Doudna and Dr. Charpentier will share a monetary award of $100,000.
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.
Previously, Dr. Doudna has won the 2019 Welfare Betterment Prize, the $1 million Kavli Prize in Nanoscience, the Dickson Prize in Science from Carnegie Mellon University, the $1.24 million Tang Prize in Pharmaceutical Sciences, the $3 million 2015 Breakthrough Prize, and the 50 million yen Japan Prize, among others.