Jennifer Doudna, a UC Berkeley biochemist who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the invention of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing, has been awarded a National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the nation’s highest honor for technological achievement.
President Joe Biden named Doudna and 10 other technology medalists in a White House announcement last Friday, Jan. 3.
Doudna is a professor of molecular and cell biology and of chemistry, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, a faculty scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and founder of the Innovative Genomics Institute. At Berkeley, she holds the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair in Biomedical and Health Science and is the executive director of the Li Ka Shing Center for Genomic Engineering.