Watch Jennifer Doudna deliver the 29th annual Ullyot Public Affairs Lecture.

As an internationally renowned professor of biochemistry, biophysics, and structural biology at the University of California, Berkeley, Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues rocked the research world in 2012 by describing a simple way of editing the DNA of any organism using an RNA-guided protein found in bacteria. This technology, called CRISPR-Cas9, has opened the floodgates of possibility for human and nonhuman applications of gene editing, including assisting researchers in the fight against HIV, sickle-cell disease, and muscular dystrophy.

Doudna is an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Inventors, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also a foreign member of the Royal Society and has received many other honors, including the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Biomedicine, and the Japan Prize. She is the coauthor with Sam Sternberg of A Crack in Creation, a personal account of her research and the societal and ethical implications of gene editing.

Doudna earned a BA in biochemistry from Pomona College and a PhD in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology from Harvard Medical School.

This program is presented in partnership with the Philadelphia and Delaware Sections of the American Chemical Society, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia.