Katherine Pollard

Katherine Pollard is Director of the Gladstone Institute of Data Science & Biotechnology, a Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator, and Professor in the Division of Bioinformatics at University of California, San Francisco. She has a PhD in Biostatistics from University of California, Berkeley, where she played a key role in the development of statistical methods and open-source software (http://bioconductor.org) for analysis of DNA microarrays. She was a postdoctoral fellow in comparative genomics at University of California, Santa Cruz from 2003 to 2005, where she participated in the chimpanzee genome project and discovered Human Accelerated Regions. From 2005 to 2008, Katherine was Assistant Professor in the Genome Center and Department of Statistics at University of California, Davis. In 2008, she moved to Gladstone Institutes and University of California, San Francisco. 

Katherine was awarded the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship in 1995 and the Sloan Research Fellowship in 2008. The UC Berkeley School of Public Health recognized her as Alumna of the Year in 2013 and as one of its 75 most influential alums in 2018. The San Francisco Business Times honored her in 2018 as one of its Women Who Lead in the Life Sciences. She is a member of the California Academy of Sciences.

The Pollard lab develops statistical and computational methods for the analysis of massive genomic datasets. The group specializes in evolutionary genomics, in particular identifying genome sequences that differ significantly between or within species and their relationship to biomedical traits.