Jennifer Doudna

Doudna was an undergraduate student at Pomona College in Claremont, California, where she studied biochemistry.

She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Biochemistry in 1985. She chose Harvard Medical School for her doctoral study and earned a PhD in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology in 1989.Her Ph.D. dissertation was on a system that increased the efficiency of a self-replicating catalytic RNA and was supervised by Jack W. Szostak.

Beginning in March 2020, Doudna organized an effort to use CRISPR-based technologies to address the COVID-19 pandemic along with Dave Savage, Robert Tjian, and other colleagues at the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), where they created a testing center.

This center processes more than 1,000 patient samples per day. Mammoth Biosciences announced a peer-reviewed validation of a rapid, CRISPR-based point of need COVID-19 diagnostic which is faster and less expensive than qRT-PCR based tests.

Cate is currently a Berkeley professor and works on gene-editing yeast to increase their cellulose fermentation for biofuel production.

Doudna and Cate have a son born in 2002 who now attends the University of California, Berkeley and is studying Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.