Jennifer Doudna, faculty scientist in the Molecular Biophysics & Integrated Bioimaging Division, will share the 2020 Wolf Prize in Medicine, a prestigious international prize awarded in Israel for unique contributions to humanity.
Doudna, who is a UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology and of chemistry and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, shared the prize with colleague Emmanuelle Charpentier, director of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, Germany, for their 2012 invention of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology.
Doudna was lauded “for unveiling the mechanism, expected to revolutionize the medical world, of bacterial immunity through genomic RNA-guided editing,” according to the announcement by the Wolf Foundation. “With their groundbreaking findings, the scientists have laid the foundation for the development of innovative genome-specific editing and engineering technology.”
Doudna, Charpentier, and their fellow Wolf Prize recipients in various disciplines will be honored this June in Jerusalem. For more information, please visit the UC Berkeley News Center.
