Jennifer Doudna Wins American Chemical Society’s Priestley Award

Jennifer Doudna has been named the recipient of the 2026 Priestley Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the American Chemical Society (ACS), for her high-impact discoveries on RNA molecules with enzymatic functions, including the development of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology. 

The ACS announcement cites her outstanding research “on ribozyme function, Dicer and double-stranded RNA processing and CRISPR gene editing, and for impactful international science leadership.” Doudna will formally accept the award and deliver an address at the ACS Spring 2026 conference.

Doudna, a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), founder of the Innovative Genomics Institute, and a professor at UC Berkeley, previously received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation for her work on CRISPR-Cas9.

“This revolutionary technology enabled scientists to make precise changes to DNA with unprecedented accuracy and efficiency, fundamentally transforming biology and medicine,” the ACS stated in their release. 

Doudna became interested in the varied roles of RNA outside its function as a genetic messenger during her education at Harvard Medical School, when she designed a self-replicating RNA. As a research fellow at the University of Colorado at Boulder, she began crystallizing RNAs so that she could study their structures and understand the physical basis of the molecules’ catalytic activities. She continued this work while on faculty at Yale University, and when she joined UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab in 2002, she pursued her interest in how RNA molecules decide what genetic information gets disseminated in cells.

In 2008, Doudna began studying recently discovered repetitive sequences in bacterial genomes called CRISPR, using funding from a Department of Energy Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program award. Her worked helped reveal that the repeats are part of a bacterial immune defense system that identifies DNA from invading viruses, then deploys enzymes to cut the DNA and neutralize the pathogens. Building upon findings from this early work and other investigations, in 2012, a team led by Doudna and her co-investigator, Emmanuelle Charpentier, detailed the underlying mechanisms of one of these systems, called CRISPR-Cas9, and explained how it can be programmed to cut any DNA from any organism at a target sequence. This seminal work was published in the journal Science.

Today, Doudna and Charpentier’s Nobel Prize-winning CRISPR-Cas9 technology is used daily in laboratories across the world to quickly and efficiently edit genomes for a wide variety of biomedical research. CRISPR-Cas is the basis of many promising medical treatments, including gene therapies that can cure previously intractable genetic diseases. Scientists are also using these technologies to design efficient and resilient crop plants and engineer microbes that can produce valuable biofuels and bioproducts.

Doudna’s research teams continue to explore applications for CRISPR-Cas systems and develop new medical therapies. 

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