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

preprint In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset versio ...

s and

open peer review Open peer review is the various possible modifications of the traditional scholarly peer review process. The three most common modifications to which the term is applied are: # Open identities: Authors and reviewers are aware of each other's ident ...

. She was one of the organizers of a recent meeting they held on

scholarly communication Scholarly communication involves the creation, publication, dissemination and discovery of academic research, primarily in peer-reviewed journals and books. It is “the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evalu ...

Education

Polka received a BS in Biology from the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States ...

in 2007. While there, she was a Morehead Scholar. She obtained a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the

University of California, San Francisco The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a public land-grant research university in San Francisco, California. It is part of the University of California system and is dedicated entirely to health science and life science. It cond ...

under the supervision of Dyche Mullins in 2012.

Career

In 2013 Polka became a research fellow in the department of Systems Biology at

Harvard Medical School Harvard Medical School (HMS) is the graduate medical school of Harvard University and is located in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1782, HMS is one of the oldest medical schools in the United States and is consi ...

with

Pamela Silver Pamela A. Silver is an American cell and systems biologist and a bioengineer. She holds the Elliot T. and Onie H. Adams Professorship of Biochemistry and Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Systems Biology. Silver is ...

as advisor. She was also held a visiting scholar at the

Whitehead Institute Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research is a non-profit research institute located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States that is dedicated to improving human health through basic biomedical research. It was founded as a fiscally indepen ...

in Massachusetts. Polka conducted research in the assembly, function, and applications of protein polymers in

bacteria Bacteria (; singular: bacterium) are ubiquitous, mostly free-living organisms often consisting of one biological cell. They constitute a large domain of prokaryotic microorganisms. Typically a few micrometres in length, bacteria were among ...

, such as membrane-breaking protein needles called R bodies. Polka's work on R bodies was discussed in the American magazine ''

The Atlantic ''The Atlantic'' is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher. It features articles in the fields of politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science. It was founded in 1857 in Boston, ...

,'' and covered by the

American Chemical Society The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a scientific society based in the United States that supports scientific inquiry in the field of chemistry. Founded in 1876 at New York University, the ACS currently has more than 155,000 members at all d ...

. Polka discovered that

carboxysome Carboxysomes are bacterial microcompartments (BMCs) consisting of polyhedral protein shells filled with the enzymes ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (RuBisCO)—the predominant enzyme in carbon fixation and the rate limiting e ...

, a protein organelle in

cyanobacteria Cyanobacteria (), also known as Cyanophyta, are a phylum of gram-negative bacteria that obtain energy via photosynthesis. The name ''cyanobacteria'' refers to their color (), which similarly forms the basis of cyanobacteria's common name, blu ...

, grows like a crystal until it is coated by a layer of shell proteins. Extended R bodies

Polka was co-chair of the

American Society for Cell Biology The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) is a professional society that was founded in 1960.

Improving research culture

Polka is on the steering committee for Rescuing Biomedical Research, an initiative to discuss solutions to problems addressed in the April 2014 ''

PNAS ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America'' (often abbreviated ''PNAS'' or ''PNAS USA'') is a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary scientific journal. It is the official journal of the National Academy of Scien ...

'' article "Rescuing US biomedical research from its systemic flaws". 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 Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physics, physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomenon, phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. ...

'' and ''

Science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...

'' on these topics. In 2015, Polka and Viviane Callier wrote an article for the careers column in ''Nature'' where they argue that funding agencies should support more than 16% of postdocs through fellowships. This would allow postdocs to "strike out away from the beaten path ndwill bring fresh ideas and approaches to the table".

Future of Research

Polka was one of the organisers of the first Future of Research Symposium in Boston in 2014. She was on the executive committee until she became President of the Board of Directors in 2016. Polka is involved in creating debate amongst early-career scientists about the financial, historical and political influences on academic research. Future of Research was awarded the People of the Year award in 2015 by

journal for their "efforts to empower early-career and aspiring scientists...".

ASAPbio

Polka was a founder of ASAPbio which began in 2015 after Ron Vale showed that

students were taking a long time to publish and proposed that

ing might mitigate the issue. Vale recruited Polka,

Daniel Colon-Ramos Daniel is a masculine given name and a surname of Hebrew language, Hebrew origin. It means "God is my judge"Hanks, Hardcastle and Hodges, ''Oxford Dictionary of First Names'', Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, , p. 68. (cf. Gabriel (given ...

and

Harold Varmus Harold Eliot Varmus (born December 18, 1939) is an American Nobel Prize-winning scientist. He is currently the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and a senior associate at the New York Genome Center. He was a ...

which led to the first ASAPbio meeting in February 2016 attended by scientists, representatives from funding agencies, journals and preprint servers. The meeting Polka led was widely recognized as a turning point in scholarly communication and a catalyst moment in the so-called "preprint revolution" in biology and science more generally. Polka began working full-time at ASAPbio in 2016 after funding was granted from the

Simons Foundation The Simons Foundation is a private foundation established in 1994 by Marilyn and Jim Simons with offices in New York City. As one of the largest charitable organizations in the US with assets of over $5 billion in 2022, the foundation's mission ...

Sloan Foundation The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is an American philanthropic nonprofit organization. It was established in 1934 by Alfred P. Sloan Jr., then-president and chief executive officer of General Motors. The Sloan Foundation makes grants to support or ...

Arnold Foundation Arnold Ventures LLC (formerly known as The Laura and John Arnold Foundation) is focused on evidence-based giving in a wide range of categories including: criminal justice, education, health care, and public finance. The organization was founded by ...

, and

Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation is an American foundation established by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore and his wife Betty I. Moore in September 2000 to support scientific discovery, environmental conservation, patient care improvements a ...

. In 2016 Polka was described in the journal ''Nature'' as an "agent of change" for explaining how junior researchers can increase the impact of their work. For instance, ASAPbio encourages preprints within biology. ASAPbio tries to mitigate the effect of lengthy waiting times before publications are reviewed and published, following the example of physics, computer science and maths, fields that have already adopted preprints. She has also taken an interest in strategies for preventing sexual harassment in the scientific community. In 2017,

PLOS PLOS (for Public Library of Science; PLoS until 2012 ) is a nonprofit publisher of open-access journals in science, technology, and medicine and other scientific literature, under an open-content license. It was founded in 2000 and launc ...

cast interviewed Polka about her work which contributes to the changing way that science is published. Since 2019, ASAPBio has begun to host open databases to collate information about academic publishing practices. ReimagineReview tracks the different peer review policies and models of academic journals, with a focus on experimental forms of peer review. The Transpose database extends on this to cover journal policies including on peer review, co-reviewing, preprints, licensing, and versioning.

Awards and honors

Beckman Coulter Beckman Coulter Inc. is a Danaher Corporation company that develops, manufactures, and markets products that simplify, automate and innovate complex biomedical testing. It operates in two industries: Diagnostics and Life Sciences. For more than ...

Distinguished Graduate Student Prize (

American Society for Cell Biology The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) is a professional society that was founded in 1960.Jane Coffin Childs The Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research (the "JCC"), established in 1937, awards the "Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellowship" for research in the medical and related sciences bearing on cancer. History The Fund was founded ...

Fellowship (2013–2016)

References

External links

*
Rescuing Biomedical Research

ASAPbio
{{DEFAULTSORT:Polka, Jessica Systems biologists Harvard Medical School faculty Living people American molecular biologists Women molecular biologists University of California alumni Synthetic biologists Open content activists University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill alumni 21st-century American chemists 21st-century biologists American women chemists 21st-century American women scientists American women biochemists Year of birth missing (living people) American women academics