Jenness Simler, Majority Policy Director
As majority policy director, Jenness Simler has a wide range of responsibilities, from managing strategy and committee organization to advising the chairman.
Simler, 39, jumped to the Hill in 2005 from the Defense Department, where she was deputy to the chairman of the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Combating Terrorism Technology Task Force. She started out at the committee overseeing science and technology policy before working her way to her current post.
She didn’t plan to be a congressional staffer, but what was supposed to be a half-hour interview for a position on the panel turned into three hours. Simler says she liked that “it seems like so many people ... that work on the committee didn’t professionally grow up on Capitol Hill.”
Simler has been around the military for most of her life. Her father served in the Army, and she attended three different high schools (in fact, she was born in Okinawa, Japan).
Simler became the fourth generation of her family to attend Millsaps College, a small liberal arts school in Jackson, Miss., taking math and premed courses. She received an M.B.A. from the University of Maryland.
