Meet the Civic Science Associates: 2022

Project: Tools for Inclusive Grantmaking: Through contributing to the development and implementation of the Inclusive Grantmaking Initiative, Jenna will coordinate efforts to eliminate bias and discrimination in grantmaking for health research, enhancing equity and inclusivity within the scientific funding ecosystem.

Jenna Hicks is a Civic Science Associate and the Project Lead for the Inclusive Grantmaking Initiative at the Health Research Alliance. Jenna comes to this position with a background in biomedical research, education research, and graduate education administration. She holds a Ph.D. in Biomedical Science from the University of California, San Diego. At the Health Research Alliance, Jenna will apply her skills in project management and research design to collaborate with funders of health research to implement and evaluate strategies to promote inclusivity and grantmaking. Jenna’s ongoing and potential future projects include creating bias reduction training materials for program staff and reviewers, studying the impacts of blinded peer review strategies, and developing a guide to equitable and informative data collection.

Project: Cultivating Inclusive Laboratory Environments: Krithika will advance efforts to support the cultivation of inclusive laboratory environments—developing interactive, evidence-based resources to help investigators create diversity and inclusivity within research spaces in and beyond Rockefeller University.

Krithika holds a Ph.D. from The Rockefeller University, where she completed her dissertation on the reproductive strategies of globally invasive disease-transmitting mosquitoes through the lens of behavior and genetics. She previously received a B.A. magna cum laude from Smith College, and remains an active member of the Smith alumnae community, conducting interviews annually for prospective students in the greater New York City area. Krithika is now a scientist at the Simons Foundation, overseeing the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain (SCGB). Her work at Simons is centered on advancing scientific knowledge by facilitating diverse, cross-disciplinary collaborations, improving the clarity of scientific communication, and building streamlined and efficient frameworks to strengthen scientific communities. Krithika was born in Chennai, India, and spent her childhood between Brussels, Belgium and Bengaluru, India. From her global adventures, Krithika has grown fond of languages, speaking Tamil, English, and French fluently, and dabbling in German and Kannada.