Bio: Jessica Polka

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.

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