A Pomona College alumna won the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry for her work developing a genome-editing method, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Wednesday, Oct. 7.
Doudna, a professor and researcher at UC Berkeley, is the first Pomona College graduate to receive a Nobel Prize, the college said Wednesday.
“Jennifer Doudna’s revolutionary research in gene editing and her thoughtful consideration of its implications hold the potential to change the lives of countless people around the globe,” Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr said in a news release Wednesday.
“We are so proud that she received her undergraduate education at Pomona College and that she continues to engage in the life of our community,” Starr continued. “Her sense of discovery, her commitment to rigorous work and her willingness to reflect on its meaning embody some of the highest values of the college.”
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced it had awarded the prize to Doudna and her colleague, Emmanuelle Charpentier, director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin, for their work on CRISPR, considered a revolutionary advancement in biomedicine.
CRISPR, or “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” are described as genetic scissors that make it possible for scientists to rewrite DNA sequences and modify gene function. Correcting genetic defects and treating certain diseases is one area that researchers are now able to further examine with the technology.
This marks the first time two women have shared the prize. The chemists will share a prize of 10 million Swedish krona — more than $1 million.
Doudna, 56, who was born in Washington, D.C., graduated from Pomona College in 1985 with a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry. She later attended Harvard Medical School and earned a Ph.D. in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology in 1989.
Doudna grew up on Hawaii’s big island, where her father was a professor of English literature at University of Hawaii, attending Hilo High School before coming to Pomona. She cites her Pomona education as a key ingredient in her scholarly success.
“I am grateful to Pomona every day, honestly,” she said in a recent Pomona College Magazine interview, “because it was a liberal arts education that exposed me to so many ideas that I would never have come in contact with, probably, without having attended Pomona.”
Doudna is a former member of the Pomona College Board of Trustees. She was chosen for the 2009 Robbins Lectureship, which has brought a number of Nobel laureates to speak at the college in recent years.
City News contributed to this report.
