University of California President Michael V. Drake, M.D., released today (Oct. 7) the statement below following the announcement of the Nobel Prize in chemistry. UC Berkeley biochemist Jennifer Doudna won the 2020 Nobel Prize, sharing it with colleague Emmanuelle Charpentier for the co-development of CRISPR-Cas9, a genome editing breakthrough that has revolutionized biomedicine.
Doudna, who is the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair in Biomedical and Health Sciences and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at UC Berkeley, is president and chair of the board of the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes and an adjunct professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology at UC San Francisco. Charpentier, who in 2012 was affiliated with the University of Vienna and Umeå University in Sweden, was appointed director of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin in 2015.
The groundbreaking work of Professor Jennifer Doudna has ushered in a revolutionary new era in genomics. This Nobel Prize, which recognizes the discovery and real-world applications of CRISPR-Cas9, will continue to transform the scientific world, opening up new avenues for curing genetic diseases, improving crops and developing new biofuels. On behalf of the entire UC community, I join Chancellor Carol Christ in extending heartfelt congratulations to Professor Doudna.