Emmanuelle Charpentier is a French microbiologist, geneticist and biochemist. Charpentier worked at the Max F. Perutz Laboratories of the University of Vienna and at MedUni Vienna between 2002 and 2009, and after her habilitation in microbiology in 2006 she was employed as an associate professor. In 2009, Charpentier went to Umeå University in Sweden to the Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden MIMS.
Charpentier’s research is in the field of regulatory mechanisms underlying infection processes and immunity of pathogenic bacteria. Here, her focus is on gene regulation at the level of (bacterial) ribonucleic acid (RNA) and molecular biology research of infections.
Since 2018, Charpentier has been director of the Max Planck Research Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin; previously, she was director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin since 2015. In 2020, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Jennifer A. Doudna for the development of the “gene scissors” CRISPR/Cas9.