Jessica Polka

Jessica Polka is a biochemist and the Executive Director of ASAPbio (Accelerating Science and Publication in biology), a non-profit initiative promoting innovation and transparency via preprints and open peer review.[4][9] Polka is recognised as having insight into issues surrounding open peer review, preprint and early career progression, and has been quoted in numerous articles by Nature and Science on these topics.[18] Polka was a founder of ASAPbio which began in 2015 after Ron Vale showed that University of California, San Francisco students were taking a long time to publish and proposed that preprinting might mitigate the issue.[19] Vale recruited Polka, Daniel Colon-Ramos and Harold Varmus which led to the first ASAPbio meeting in February 2016 attended by scientists, representatives from funding agencies, journals and preprint servers.[20] The meeting Polka led was widely recognized as a turning point in scholarly communication[2][21][22] and a catalyst moment in the so-called "preprint revolution" in biology and science more generally.
Negatively stained electron micrograph of purified R bodies in their extended (low pH) state, taken by Polka.
University of California, San FranciscoUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel HillWhitehead InstituteHarvard Medical SchoolThesisDoctoral advisorPamela Silverpreprintsopen peer reviewscholarly communicationbacteriaR bodiesThe AtlanticAmerican Chemical SocietycarboxysomecyanobacteriaAmerican Society for Cell BiologyNatureScienceRon ValepreprintingDaniel Colon-RamosHarold VarmusSimons FoundationSloan FoundationArnold FoundationGordon and Betty Moore FoundationPLOScastBeckman CoulterJane Coffin ChildsBibcodeNational Academies Press