Jennifer Doudna

Dr. Doudna is a co-founder of Caribou and a faculty member of the departments of Molecular and Cell Biology and Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, is a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her research seeks to understand how non-coding RNA molecules control the expression of genetic information and she has published extensively in the field of CRISPR-Cas biology. Dr. Doudna’s work and that of her collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier was recognized by the award of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020 as well as a 2015 Breakthrough Prize. Her work on CRISPR-Cas systems has also been recognized with the Paul Janssen Award for Biomedical Research and a Lurie Prize in Biomedical Sciences, and the Princess of Asturias award. Dr. Doudna was also named to the 2015 TIME Magazine’s TIME 100 list of the 100 most influential people in the world. After serving as a member of the Yale University faculty for eight years, during which time she was promoted to Henry Ford II Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, she joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 2002. Dr. Doudna earned a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Harvard University and was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder.