Charpentier, Emmanuelle Marie [key], 1968–, French microbiologist, Ph.D. Pierre and Marie Curie Univ., 1995. Following postdoctoral appointments at several institutions, Charpentier became a researcher at the Univ. of Vienna in 2002, then was at the Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden, Umeå Univ., Sweden, from 2009 to 2014. After working as a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin from 2015 to 2018, she founded the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens. She has studied the regulatory mechanisms underlying infection and immunity in bacterial pathogens, which led, through work with Jennifer Doudna, to understanding a naturally occurring genome editing system used by bacterial immune systems and adapting it to create CRISPR-Cas9, a method that enables scientists to add, remove, or alter genetic material at particular locations in the genome. Charpentier and Doudna received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their development of the method, which has potential applications in treating cancer and other diseases, in curing inherited conditions, and in modifying crop plants to yield specific characteristics.
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