Email: ryajima AT aaas.org

Rieko Yajima
Senior Program Associate, Research Competitiveness Program

Rieko Yajima is a Senior Program Associate with the Research Competitiveness Program, which is a subdivision of AAAS that provides review, evaluation, and guidance to the science and engineering community on the development of quality research programs.

She is a graduate of the Integrative Biosciences Ph.D. program at The Pennsylvania State University. Her research focused on the structure and function of RNA enzymes and was funded by a postgraduate scholarship from the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada. In 2004, she was a Christine Mirzayan Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council. At The National Academies, she supported the Committee on Science, Engineering, & Public Policy (COSEPUP) on a study that establishes guidelines for appointing individuals to science and technology leadership positions in the federal government. Rieko received her Honours Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. During that time, she did research in protein X-ray crystallography at Kirin Brewery’s Central Laboratories for Key Technology in Yokohama, Japan and studied Spanish at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, Cuba.