Jarah Meador
Prizes, Challenges, and Crowdsourcing Program Executive
Jarah Meador, PhD, is an open innovation practitioner with more than a dozen years of experience in the federal government leading prize competitions, hackathons, industry demonstrations, innovation summits, broad agency announcements, and public-private partnerships as tools for innovation.
Most recently, at the General Services Administration (GSA), Jarah led Challenge.gov and CitizenScience.gov, the federal government’s platforms and programs supporting prize competitions and citizen science. In this role her team managed the federal-wide Prizes and Challenges Community of Practice. At the US Department of Veterans Affairs, Jarah served as the external innovation sourcing lead and managed a portfolio of innovation projects in partnership with industry, non-profits, and academia on topics including suicide prevention, kidney disease, artificial intelligence and risk prediction, and digital memorialization, to name a few. Jarah entered the federal government as an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the U.S. Agency for International Development, where she successfully led the Desal Prize, the “second call” of the Securing Water for Food Grand Challenge for Development.
Jarah has a PhD in Cancer Biology from the University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and her research focused on understanding the damaging effects of radiation on biological systems – under the ozone hole in Antarctica, for astronauts during space flight, and patients receiving radiation treatment to treat cancer. At NASA, she studied the risks of human spaceflight and how charged particles in space traverse cells in the human body causing chromosomal damage. As a NASA-funded scientist at Columbia University, she studied ionizing radiation induced transformation of mammary stem cells.
Jarah is a veteran of the Air Force Reserves, where she served as an aeromedical evacuation technician. Outside of work she enjoys cattle ranching and spending time exploring San Antonio, TX, where she lives with her wife and two children.