Emmanuelle Charpentier

Emmanuelle Charpentier is a French Nobel Prize-winning scientist. In collaboration with the team of the American biochemist Jennifer Doudna, she discovered a molecular tool known as clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR-Cas9). Charpentier shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Doudna. In 2013, Charpentier co-founded CRISPR Therapeutics, a company that employs the CRISPR methodology for gene therapy in humans, with operations in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and headquarters in Zug, Switzerland. In 2015, after a three-year stint at the Hannover Medical School and The Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Braunschweig, Germany, Charpentier moved her lab to Max Planck in Berlin, where she founded the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in 2018. Charpentier has received numerous honors and awards, including the Canada Gairdner International Prize (2016) and the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience (2018). She was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (2015) and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts (2018).