Jessica Isaacs is the Global Impact Director for the WRI Polsky Center for the Global Energy Transition. She provides strategic leadership on the Center's direction and goals while overseeing planning, measurement, evaluation and learning (PMEL), delivery, communications and partnerships teams.

Jessica joined WRI in September 2025 after nearly twelve years as an international economist at the United States Treasury Department, where she developed deep expertise in strategy, partnerships and development and energy finance and policy. She most recently managed Treasury's global teams overseeing U.S. policy at the regional multilateral development banks, and she previously represented the United States at the World Bank Board as the lead on the International Development Association, and for three years as the Acting U.S. Executive Director at the African Development Bank in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. During her Treasury career, she worked on the Green Climate Fund Board and the G20 Energy Sustainability Working Group, served as the U.S. Deputy at the Asian Development Fund and led on climate and energy initiatives in bilateral relationships including with China, India, Mexico, and other emerging economies. She also spent six months at the International Energy Agency in Paris focused on power market design and energy access. Earlier in her career, Jessica spent five years working on domestic and international markets and policy at the American Wind Energy Association and spent a year in Taiwan as a Fulbright Scholar.

Jessica holds an MPP in energy policy from Duke University, where her master's thesis used CGE modeling to design a national clean energy standard. She was a public policy major and Chinese language minor at Scripps College in Claremont, CA, and spent a semester at Beijing Foreign Studies University.