by Max Barnhart

August 1, 2025

Jennifer A. Doudna will receive the 2026 Priestley Medal, the highest honor given out by the American Chemical Society. Doudna is a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley; the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; and Gladstone Institutes and is the founder of the Innovative Genomics Institute. ACS is recognizing her with the Priestley Medal for her discoveries on ribozyme function, the Dicer RNase enzyme, double-stranded RNA processing, and CRISPR gene editing, along with her impactful international science leadership, according to a press release by ACS.

For Doudna, the Priestley Medal is the latest in a long list of awards recognizing her and her work, including the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. But the Priestley Medal still holds special relevance for her. “For me, winning the Priestley Medal is kind of the epitome of that dream of becoming a chemist,” she says. Doudna credits her first chemistry teacher, Jeanette Wong at Hilo High School in Hawaii, for inspiring her to study chemistry. “I just started to dream at that time about the possibility of doing chemical research in the future, especially chemistry as applied to understanding biology,” she says.

"I think we all have a responsibility to communicate our passion for our work to the next generation and to inspire them to go out and make new discoveries."

Jennifer A. Doudna, 2026 Priestley Medalist

David Liu, a chemical biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Harvard University, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, calls the selection of Doudna by the ACS for the Priestley Medal an inspired choice. Liu has developed base editing and prime editing technologies that build on CRISPR gene editing technology, and he credits Doudna as an inspiration to his work. “It was not that long ago that biochemists and chemical biologists were more of a fringe part of chemistry and not part of the mainstream. I really credit Jennifer with helping to bring the chemistry of living systems . . . to the forefront of chemistry,” he says.

Doudna is also an active mentor and leads a laboratory of about 50 postdoctoral scholars, students, and staff at Berkeley. She says working with students is “the best part of my job. I get ideas from them all the time, and hopefully they get a few from me as well.”

Marena Trinidad, a graduate student in Doudna’s Berkeley lab, praises her mentor’s contribution to the world of RNA and CRISPR chemistry and also highlights how considerate she is of her students. “Few people in her position would prioritize this level of mentorship. It is a rare form of dedication and generosity that I will always admire,” Trinidad says. And Doudna knows just how important that commitment to mentorship is. “I think we all have a responsibility to communicate our passion for our work to the next generation and to inspire them to go out and make new discoveries,” she says.

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Doudna’s relationship with her students also extends well beyond the time they leave her lab. A former graduate student in her lab, Janice Chen, was part of the team that cofounded Mammoth Biosciences with Doudna and now serves as the company’s chief technology officer. Chen says that Doudna has “always been the kind of person who has opened doors for people, including myself” and that last summer the Doudna lab had a 30-year reunion celebration with roughly 100 lab alumni attending.

Doudna has also cofounded Caribou Biosciences, Scribe Therapeutics, Intellia Therapeutics, and Editas Medicine, and she serves on the advisory boards of several other companies.

The 2026 Priestley Medal will come with a $20,000 research grant as well as travel expenses to attend the ACS Spring 2026 meeting, where Doudna says she intends to give a talk about another area of research of hers—RNA and its role in the origins of life.