Jessica Polka
Senior Program Lead at MIT Open Learning
Greater Boston United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolJessica Polka is a Senior Program Lead with nine years' experience accelerating open science and reshaping how researchers share and evaluate biomedical knowledge. She has led nonprofit and institutional efforts—most notably as co-founder and long-time Executive Director of ASAPbio and as Open Science Program Director at Astera—driving adoption of preprints and open peer review across the life sciences. Trained as a biochemist and synthetic biologist (PhD UCSF, postdoc at Harvard Medical School), she combines deep domain expertise with program-building, fundraising, and community engagement skills. Based in Greater Boston, she excels at translating researcher needs into tools, policies, and convenings that change practice, not just discourse. Less obvious: she moves fluently between hands-on lab experience (bacterial cell organization and synthetic scaffolds) and high-level strategy, which gives her credibility with both scientists and funders. Jessica is known for building durable, researcher-driven initiatives that make scientific communication faster, more transparent, and more collaborative.
10 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Postdoc Synthetic Biology, Postdoc Synthetic Biology at Harvard Medical SchoolBachelor of Science (BS) Biology General, Bachelor of Science (BS) Biology General at The University of North Carolina at Chapel HillDoctor of Philosophy (PhD) Biochemistry, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Biochemistry at University of California, San Francisco
Github Skills (25)
policies10
transpose10
database8
citations7
evolution7
transparency7
creative-commons6
github-pages6
bibliography5
sprint5
css5
csl4
open-data4
open-access4
citation4
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
transpose-publishing/transpose-publishing.github.io
Apr 2018 - May 2020
Source for https://transpose-publishing.github.io (TRANsparency in Scholarly Publishing for Open Scholarship Evolution)
Contributions:103 commits, 1 PR, 104 pushes in 2 years 1 month
publishingevolutiontransposeopen-scholarshipscholarship
asapbio/licensing
Mar 2018 - Mar 2018
Contributions:1 PR, 8 pushes, 1 comment in 2 days
authorschoiceslicensingsurvey
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