Katherine Pollard

Katherine Snowden Pollard is a Professor at the Gladstone Institute of data science and biotechnology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).[1][3][4] She was awarded Fellowship of the International Society for Computational Biology in 2020 for outstanding contributions to computational biology and bioinformatics.[5][6]

Katie Pollard
Born	Katherine Snowden Pollard
Alma mater	Pomona College (BA) University of California, Berkeley (MS, PhD)
Awards	ISCB Fellow (2020)
Scientific career
Fields	Evolutionary genomics Functional genomics[1]
Institutions	Gladstone Institutes University of California, San Francisco University of California, Davis University of California, Santa Cruz
Thesis	Computationally intensive statistical methods for analysis of gene expression data (2003)
Doctoral advisor	Mark van der Laan[2]
Influences	Sandrine Dudoit David Haussler
Website	gladstone.org/people/katherine-pollard

Education

Pollard was educated at Pomona College (BA) and the University of California, Berkeley where she was awarded a Master of Science degree in 2000 followed by a PhD in 2003 for research supervised by Mark van der Laan.[7][2]

Career and research

Pollard is a leader in developing statistical models and open-source software for big data, especially in genomics.[8][9] Pollard and her team pioneered the identification the fastest-evolving regions of the human genome, known as human accelerated regions (HARs).[10][11] Pollard has also designed methods to study the human microbiome[12][13] and other microbial communities, these studies set the stage for using metagenomics in precision medicine.

Prior to working at UCSF, she held a postdoctoral research position with Sandrine Dudoit at Berkeley and worked with David Haussler at Santa Cruz.[10]

References

1. Katherine Pollard publications indexed by Google Scholar
2. Katherine Pollard at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
3. Katherine Pollard publications from Europe PubMed Central
4. Katherine Pollard publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
5. "ISCB Fellows". www.iscb.org.
6. "February 19, 2020: ISCB Congratulates and Introduces the 2020 Class of Fellows!". www.iscb.org.
7. Pollard, Katherine Snowden (2003). Computationally intensive statistical methods for analysis of gene expression data. berkeley.edu (PhD thesis). University of California, Berkeley. OCLC 937442296. ProQuest 305339168.
8. The Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium (2005). "Initial sequence of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human genome". Nature. 437 (7055): 69–87. doi:10.1038/nature04072. ISSN 0028-0836. PMID 16136131.
9. Pollard, K. S.; Hubisz, M. J.; Rosenbloom, K. R.; Siepel, A. (2009). "Detection of nonneutral substitution rates on mammalian phylogenies". Genome Research. 20 (1): 110–121. doi:10.1101/gr.097857.109. ISSN 1088-9051. PMC 2798823. PMID 19858363.
10. Pollard KS, Salama SR, King B, Kern AD, Dreszer T, Katzman S, Siepel A, Pedersen JS, Bejerano G, Baertsch R, Rosenbloom KR, Kent J, Haussler D (2006). "Forces shaping the fastest evolving regions in the human genome". PLOS Genetics. 2 (10): e168. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.0020168. PMC 1599772. PMID 17040131.
11. Kostka D, Hubisz MJ, Siepel A, Pollard KS (2012). "The role of GC-biased gene conversion in shaping the fastest evolving regions of the human genome". Molecular Biology and Evolution. 29 (3): 1047–57. doi:10.1093/molbev/msr279. PMC 3278478. PMID 22075116.
12. The Human Microbiome Project Consortium (2012). "Structure, function and diversity of the healthy human microbiome". Nature. 486 (7402): 207–214. doi:10.1038/nature11234. ISSN 0028-0836. PMC 3564958. PMID 22699609.
13. The Human Microbiome Project Consortium (2012). "A framework for human microbiome research". Nature. 486 (7402): 215–221. doi:10.1038/nature11209. ISSN 0028-0836. PMC 3377744. PMID 22699610.