Louise Glück, Emmanuelle Charpentier, Jennifer A. Doudna and Andrea M. Ghez all won a Nobel Prize in 2020. These four women have triumphed in the fields of literature, chemistry and physics.
Since the creation of the Nobel Prize in 1895, less than 60 women have received the prestigious international prize. This week, Louise Glück, Emmanuelle Charpentier, Jennifer A. Doudna and Andrea M. Ghez joined this list, triumphing in the fields of literature, chemistry and physics.
American poet Louise Glück received the Nobel Prize for Literature for "his inimitable poetic voice which, with austere beauty, makes individual existence universal ". An English teacher at Yale University, she had previously won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 and the National Book Award in 2014. "I am completely amazed that they chose a white American lyric poet (…) We got all the awards. So it seemed extremely unlikely that I would ever have this particular event to deal with in my life.", she told the New York Times.
His work includes twelve collections of poetry as well as a few volumes of essays on his art. Louise Glück is the first female poet to win the Nobel Prize for Literature since the victory of Polish writer Wislawa Szymborska in 1996.
Frenchwoman Emmanuelle Charpentier, microbiologist, geneticist and biochemist, jointly received the Nobel Prize in chemistry with Jennifer A. Doudna for their 2012 work on a new method of gene editing called Crispr-Cas9, which can be applied to experimental treatments for sickle cell disease and cancer therapies. They thus became the sixth and seventh women to receive a Nobel Prize in chemistry.
Emmanuelle Charpentier is director and founder of the Max Planck Unit for Pathogen Science in Berlin. She has devoted her career to understanding disease mechanisms, focusing specifically on infections caused by Gram-positive bacterial pathogens.
Jennifer A. Doudna is a professor of molecular and cellular biology and chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley. She also heads the Doudna Lab, which discovers and develops CRISPR systems and other RNA-guided gene regulation mechanisms in collaboration with students and postdoctoral fellows.
Dr Andrea Ghez received the Nobel Prize in Physics with Drs Roger Penrose and Reinhard Genzel. Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel have been awarded for their collection of conclusive evidence for the existence of a super massive black hole in our galaxy. By developing innovative telescopic techniques, the duo provided "the most convincing evidence to date of a super massive black hole " at the center of the Milky Way. Andrea Ghez is the fourth woman to receive a Nobel Prize in physics.
She works as a professor of astronomy at the University of California at Los Angeles. She has dedicated her career to the study of star formation and is one of the authors of the 2006 children's book, Yor Can Be a Woman Astronomer (You can be a woman astronomer).