Jessica Lee Ware was born in Montreal, Quebec, one of twins. Ware has said that she became interested in biology because her grandparents, Gwen and Harold Irons, in northern Canada encouraged her to collect snakes, insects, and frogs. Ware attended the University of Toronto Schools for grades 7-13. Ware earned a bachelor of science in invertebrate zoology from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 2001. She pursued entomology after working in the University's Entomological Museum to support herself during her studies. After graduating, Ware traveled to Costa Rica to work with Diane Srivastava for a semester. She reports that her time there led to her to choose research as a career, and it was also her first experience of working with other scientists of color. Ware went directly from her bachelor's degree to the doctoral program at Rutgers University. She was awarded a PhD in 2008, with a dissertation titled, Molecular and morphological systematics of Libelluloidea and Dictyoptera. Ware was married to another entomologist. She is now a single parent.
Career
In 2010, she was appointed as an associate professor at Rutgers University. She is also a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the National Museum of Natural History. Ware contributed to a major study of the phylogenomics of insect evolution, and developed molecular phylogeny of hexapoda. She has undertaken fieldwork in several continents. Ware is the PI and lead coordinator of her lab working over multiple PhD, masters, and undergraduate students working on research in the entomological field. Ware is active in encouraging women and people from under-represented groups to become entomologists. She was a featured speaker at the March for Science in Washington DC in 2017. She is a contributor to Entomology Today, and serves on the board of several entomological journals. As of May 7, 2020, Ware is Vice President-Elect of the Entomological Society of America. From 2019 - 2021, she is serving as the President of the Worldwide Dragonfly Association.
Honors
Ware is the recipient of a National Science Foundation career grant, as well as an Entomological Society of America Snodgrass Memorial Research Award, which recognizes "outstanding research by a graduate student". In 2008, she was one of the winners of the Entomological Society of America's John Henry Comstock Graduate Student Award. Ware also received the Leader in Faculty Diversity Award. This Rutgers wide award "honors a select number of faculty who have been leaders in promoting diversity, inclusion, equity, and access at Rutgers, either through their own academic research, teaching, community engagement research, and other forms of engagement". Ware currently serves on the Governing Board of the Entomological Society of America, representing the SysEB section.
