Emmanuelle Charpentier

About

Emmanuelle Charpentier is a renowned French biochemist, microbiologist, and geneticist born on December 11, 1968, in Juvisy-sur-Orge, France. She studied biochemistry at Pierre and Marie Curie University and earned her PhD in microbiology from the Pasteur Institute in 1995. Charpentier's early research focused on antibiotic resistance and mobile genetic elements. She spent several years in the United States, working at institutions like Rockefeller University and New York University Medical Center. In 2002, she returned to Europe, becoming a lab head at the University of Vienna. Charpentier's most significant contribution is the co-discovery of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tool with Jennifer Doudna in 2012. This breakthrough earned them the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Charpentier identified key components of the CRISPR system, including tracrRNA, which guides the Cas9 enzyme to target DNA sequences. She co-founded CRISPR Therapeutics and has received numerous awards for her work, including the Breakthrough Prize and the Kavli Prize. Charpentier is currently a director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin and the founder of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens.