Avengers of the Week | Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, Winners of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Our Avengers of the Week are French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier and American biochemist Jennifer Doudna, who received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry in December for their groundbreaking work. They met at a conference in 2011, agreed to collaborate on an intersection of their gene research, and have now received one of the highest honors for their development of CRISPR, a groundbreaking gene editing technique with wide-ranging uses across biology and medicine.

Emmanuelle Charpentier portrait by Bianca Fioretti and Jennifer Doudna portrait by Duncan Hull [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

They are respectively the sixth and seventh women to receive the Nobel Prize for Chemistry of the 187 total prize winners in Chemistry in the 105-year history of the Nobel Prize. The duo also won a Breakthrough Prize, called “the Oscars of Science”, and $3 million each for their work in 2015.

Dr. Jinelle Wint, Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs at Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, MO, told the New York Times that aspiring women scientists should be empowered to think “that they, too, can be in the next Nobel Prize winners of the future.”

Growing up in a small town outside of Paris, Charpentier, now 52, took piano and ballet lessons and developed an interest in science. She graduated from the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris with a degree in biochemistry and received her PhD in microbiology from the Pasteur Institute. She worked at the Rockefeller Institute and New York University before returning to do research in Vienna and Sweden. Most recently, she became director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin. So far, she has pursued her research at nine institutes in five countries.

Doudna, 56, was born in Washington, DC and grew up in Hilo, Hawaii. She was inspired to focus on science in high school after seeing a woman speak about her cancer research. She graduated with a degree in biochemistry from Pomona College in California and received her PhD in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology from Harvard Medical School. After teaching at Harvard and Yale University, she joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley in 2002. She is now the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Professor of Biomedical and Principal Investigator at the Doudna Laboratory at UC Berkeley.

Avengers of the Week Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna are powerful role models for what can be achieved by aspiring girls and women in the sciences around the world.

The @GenderAvenger #AvengerOfTheWeek are @e__charpentier & Jennifer Doudna, who are the 6th and 7th women in 105 years to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their development of CRISPR, inspiring girls and women around the world. #GenderAvenger https://www.genderavenger.com/blog/avengers-of-the-week-emmanuelle-charpentier-jennifer-doudna