Biography
Jarah is the Senior Advisor for innovation sourcing at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Center for Innovation where she leads efforts to improve and broaden both internal and external innovation sourcing practices and strategy across the VA enterprise. Most recently she was an American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the US Agency for International Development working on incentive prizes and challenges as part of the innovation design team in the US Global Development Lab. At USAID Jarah led the Desal Prize a $1.5M project aimed at creating small scale brackish water desalination technologies for the rural farm environment. Jarah is a broadly trained scientist who has worked in government, academia, and the private sector. Jarah’s Ph.D. is in Environmental and Molecular Carcinogenesis from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and her research career at NASA and Columbia University elucidated causal relationships between radiation exposure and cancer. Jarah is a Texan in DC via New York City.