Jessica Reese serves as HIAS’ Chief Institutional Development Officer, leading agency-wide institutional public and private fundraising, and new business development. Jessica also has a very personal connection to HIAS, which helped resettle her grandparents after the Holocaust.

Jessica has worked in humanitarian assistance, early recovery, and emergency response for two decades, working with numerous UN agencies and international NGOs. She has direct field experience in the Balkans, Central and East Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. She served on IRC’s emergency response team for five years as their first-ever Emergency Monitoring, Evaluation, and Grants Coordinator and led humanitarian response programs in Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Pakistan, Indonesia, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and Ethiopia.

She also has extensive experience in the design, monitoring, and evaluation of programs, and led external evaluations for large-scale development projects for multi-donor UN funds in Iraq and Palestine. Jessica holds an MSc in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics, with a focus on ethnic conflict and nationalization, and BA in Political Science from Rutgers University.