Nobel Laureates

Berkeley Talks: Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna on CRISPR and the future of gene editing

August 22, 2025

Portrait of Jennifer DoudnaFor UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna, the revolutionary discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing began 15 years ago with a meeting at the campus’s Free Speech Movement Cafe.

“This is a quintessential story about Berkeley,” begins Doudna, a professor of molecular and cell biology and of chemistry, in a lecture she gave on campus in April. “The research that I’ll talk about today wouldn’t have happened … if I...

Jennifer Doudna receives 2026 ACS Priestley Medal

August 6, 2025

Portrait of Jennifer DoudnaThe American Chemical Society (ACS) is proud to announce that Jennifer A. Doudna is the recipient of the 2026 Priestley Medal. This award is the highest honor bestowed by ACS, and it annually recognizes an individual for distinguished service to chemistry. Doudna receives the award for “outstanding...

Jennifer Doudna Awarded National Medal of Technology and Innovation

January 7, 2025

Headshot of woman with blond hairJennifer 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...

Four 2024 Nobel Prize winners are connected to UC Berkeley's College of Letters & Science

October 16, 2024
Nobel Prize logoDid you know?

Nine of the ten UC Berkeley faculty members holding Nobel Prizes reside in UC Berkeley's College of Letters & Science. L&S has a deep legacy of groundbreaking research and transformative discoveries, and as a result, has generated several faculty members and alumni honored with Nobel Prize awards for their academic contributions. For the 2024 Nobel Prizes, four of the Nobel...

Economist James A. Robinson, a new Nobel laureate, left a lasting impact in his years at UC Berkeley

October 15, 2024

The years 1999 to 2004 were a period of incredible academic creativity and productivity for James Robinson, an economist and political scientist at UC Berkeley. His research and writing were transforming how the world thinks about the development of low-income countries. His teaching was shaping a generation of young Berkeley scholars who would help advance his ideas about why some nations were rich and others poor.

Today, Robinson was named one of the winners of the 2024 Nobel...

David Baker, a UC Berkeley Ph.D., awarded 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

October 9, 2024

This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry was shared by David Baker, a biochemist who received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1989 working with Randy Schekman, a professor of molecular and cell biology who won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

At Berkeley, Baker conducted research primarily on protein transport and protein trafficking in yeast, the field in which Schekman received the prize. But after a postdoctoral fellowship at UCSF, he joined the biochemistry...

Alumnus Gary Ruvkun shares 2024 Nobel Prize for discovering microRNA

October 7, 2024

UC Berkeley alumnus Gary Ruvkun has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Ruvkun, a 1973 graduate with a B.A. in biophysics, shares the prize with Victor Ambros, a professor at the UMass Chan Medical School, for their discovery of microRNA and and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation. MicroRNA are tiny pieces of genetic information that play critical roles in helping cells regulate gene expression and control what types of proteins they produce.

The work from Ruvkun and Ambros has influenced scientists worldwide, guiding research for diseases such...

How looking closely led this cell biologist to world-changing breakthroughs

September 30, 2024

Hear Randy Schekman, a UC Berkeley professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, explain his Nobel Prize-winning work in just 101 seconds.

Screenshot of man speaking to camera with an inset of cells next to him

For Randy Schekman, a UC Berkeley professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, the study of life and basic research has been a calling since...

Podcast: Reengineering Life: The Next Frontiers in Science

September 11, 2024

Fareed Zakaria GPS takes a comprehensive look at foreign affairs and global policies through in-depth, one-on-one interviews and fascinating roundtable discussions.

On the September 2, 2024 episode: Reengineering Life: The Next Frontiers in Science

Fareed examines two emerging technologies that are already changing life as we know it—CRISPR gene editing and artificial intelligence—in interviews with two women who pioneered them: UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna and Stanford’s Fei-Fei Li.

CRISPR co-creator Jennifer Doudna on watching her groundbreaking gene-editing technology help sickle cell patients

September 11, 2024

Jennifer Doudna wearing a white lab coat and standing in a labWhen biochemist Jennifer Doudna and her research partner, Emmanuelle Charpentier, published a paper in Science 12 years ago, they had a hunch that their findings would transform how genomics is used in medicine. The paper outlined a method they’d developed for editing DNA that used an RNA-based system known as CRISPR-Cas9. The approach was more efficient and precise...