 | Dr. Thomas D. Pollard |
Dr. Thomas D. Pollard, the newly named Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, is a nationally recognized scientist whose pioneering work in cell biology has focused on understanding the molecular basis of cellular movements.
Since 2004, Pollard has been chair of the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. He and his colleagues discovered and characterized a number of protein molecules that produce the forces for cells to move from place to place. They combined microscopy, biochemistry, biophysics, molecular biology and genetics to provide the evidence to formulate a detailed molecular explanation for how assembly of actin filaments produces cellular movements. His research group is now using the same approach to learn how cells divide in two at the end of the cell cycle.
Pollard joined the Yale faculty in 2001 as the Eugene Higgins Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology and Cell Biology. In 2003 he also became professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry. Prior to that, he served as president of The Salk Institute for Biological Studies from 1996 to 2000 and was a professor there until 2001.
A graduate of Pomona College, Pollard earned his M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School and completed a medical internship at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. After serving for several years as a staff associate in the Laboratory of Biochemistry, Section in Biochemistry and Ultrastructure, at the National Heart and Lung Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, he joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School as an assistant professor of anatomy in 1972. After leaving Harvard in 1978, he was director of the Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy at Johns Hopkins Medical School for 19 years. At Johns Hopkins he was founding director of a graduate program in cellular and molecular medicine and was honored with teaching awards seven times.
The Yale scientist has also taught at the University of California, San Diego, and has had a long affiliation with the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
For his scientific contributions, Pollard shared Brandeis University's 1996 Rosensteil Award with James Spudich of Stanford University. He received the Biophysical Society's Public Service Award in 1997, the University of Chicago's Howard T. Ricketts Award in 2000 and the American Society for Cell Biology's E.B. Wilson Medal -- the society's highest award for science.
His other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MERIT Award from the National Institute of General Medicine, an honorary degree from Pomona College and invitations from universities throughout the United States and in Canada and England to deliver named lectures, including the Lynch Lectures at the University of Notre Dame, the Naidorf Lecture at Columbia University and the Alma Howard Lecture at McGill University.
Pollard has been an outspoken advocate for biomedical research funding and has served as president of two major scientific societies: the American Society for Cell Biology (1987-1988) and the Biophysical Society (1992-1993). He has held leadership positions at the National Academy of Sciences and has served on numerous scientific advisory boards and on the editorial boards of many professional journals.
At Yale, Pollard is a co-organizer of the Yale Science Forum and has served on numerous committees and subcommittees concerned with issues in the sciences.
The Yale scientist is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Microbiology and the Biophysical Society.
T H I S
Dr. Thomas D. Pollard named Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology
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