Jennifer Doudna Keynote Speaker

Dr. Jennifer Doudna is the co-recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, awarded for her groundbreaking research on Crispr technologies –  this is a method she pioneered to enable gene editing. These breakthroughs have has opened the floodgates of possibility for non-human and human applications including assisting researchers in the fight against HIV, sickle cell anemia and cystic fibrosis; the implications go far beyond the life sciences and the research that Dr. Doudna has spearheaded truly will change the way we understand the world.

Today Doudna is widely recognized as a leading expert on RNA-protein biochemistry, CRISPR biology, and genome engineering, and currently holds memberships with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, along with the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Inventors and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Doudna is a professor of molecular and cell biology and chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, where she holds the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair in Biomedical and Health Sciences, and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

As a co-inventor of CRISPR-Cas9, a process that revolutionized gene editing, she has received numerous honors including the NSF Waterman Award, the FNIH Lurie Prize, the Paul Janssen Award for Biomedical Research, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the Gruber Prize in Genetics, the Massry Prize, the Heineken Award, the Gairdner Award, the Nakasone Award, the L’Oreal-UNESCO International Prize for Women in Science, and, of course, the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the National Academy of Inventors, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, and she was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2015.