Jennifer Hackett

Jennifer A. Hackett received B.A. degrees in Biology and Chemistry from DePauw University where she worked with Chester S. Fornari and was awarded The Albert E. Reynolds Prize in Biology in 1998. In 2003, she received her Ph.D. in Human Genetics and Molecular Biology from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine where she studied the role of telomere dysfunction in genome instability with Carol W. Greider and was awarded The Nupur Dinesh Thekdi Young Investigator Research Award. In 2003, she was awarded The Harold Weintraub Graduate Student Award from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in 2006 with Stephen J. Elledge at Harvard Medical School where she contributed to the development of whole-genome shRNA screens to interrogate human diseases. While in Boston, she volunteered in programs for children through Boston Cares, motivating her to join the New York City Teaching Fellows and begin teaching high school science in 2006. As a Teaching Fellow, she received a Masters in Education from Lehman College while teaching in the New York City Public Schools. In 2008, she began teaching at an independent school in New York City, including teaching Biology, Chemistry, and a college-level Advanced Molecular Biology course that she designed in 2011. In addition to traditional teaching, she has mentored SMART Teams (protein modeling through Milwaukee School of Engineering) and an iGEM team. She has specialized in teaching science through inquiry, receiving formal training from BSCS in their 5E Inquiry method. She was recruited by BSCS to collaborate on the creation of the BSCS/NIH curriculum supplements, Rare Diseases and Scientific Inquiry (2011) and Allergies and Scientific Inquiry (2017). This first draft of the textbook, Molecular Biology: Concepts for Inquiry, was written during the 2011-2012 school year to facilitate the incorporation of inquiry instruction into her Advanced Molecular Biology course. Since 2012, she and her students have collaborated with Jef Boeke at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and NYU Langone Medical Center on research connected to Sc2.0, the Synthetic Yeast Genome Project.