Celebrating women’s mentorship: Stories from St. Jude luminaries

In many ways, Baltimore was ahead of his time, and with a change in leadership came Tuomanen’s realization that it was time to find a new home. When she arrived at St. Jude, she knew she’d found it. But she didn’t come to St. Jude alone; a trainee from her lab transitioned to St. Jude with her.

“Emmanuelle is a person of great bravery and energy. From the time she walked through the doors at St. Jude, she realized that just doing the science was only a small part of the picture you could imagine drawing.”

At the time, Emmanuelle Charpentier, PhD, now a director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, was still a postdoctoral researcher. She became devoted to making a difference for the kids at St. Jude. Tuomanen maintains that Charpentier’s drive to pursue the clinical application of biological discovery belongs to the environment cultivated by St. Jude. Charpentier would ultimately leverage her understanding of mechanisms of bacterial resistance to develop a method for genome editing, kickstarting the CRISPR revolution. In 2020, Charpentier became a Nobel laureate herself, winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry — a proud moment for her mentor, Tuomanen.

“She always wanted a family but never started one of her own. She has been invited to receive countless honors, with family as guests. When she goes to receive all these prizes, she brings me. I don’t know, as a mentor, if there is a greater honor.”