Jessica Polka is the director of ASAPbio. Prior to this position, she was a postdoctoral research fellow in the department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, mentored by Pamela Silver and co-mentored by Timothy Mitchison.
Polka received her BS in Biology from UNC-CH and her PhD in Biochemistry from UCSF, where she worked with Dyche Mullins on reconstitution of plasmid segregation by a bacterial actin homolog.
She has served as co-chair of ASCB’s COMPASS (Committee for Postdocs and Students) and was co-lead organizer of Future of Research Symposium, held in Boston in 2014.
Polka is currently a Jane Coffin Childs Fellow; she has also been a recipient of the ASCB Beckman Coulter Distinguished Graduate Student Prize, a Genentech Graduate Fellowship, the NSF GRFP, and the Morehead Scholarship.