Thomas D. Pollard
Thomas Dean Pollard (* July 7, 1942 in Pasadena, California) is an American biochemist and cell biologist. He is Sterling Professor of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Developmental Biology and Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
Life
Pollard earned a bachelor's degree in 1964 at Pomona College in Claremont, California, and in 1968 a MD at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As a medical assistant, he worked at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts before he became a research assistant at the Department of Biochemistry of the National Heart and Lung Institute, a facility of the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland.
A first professorship was awarded Pollard in the anatomy of the Harvard Medical School ( Assistant Professor in 1972, Associate Professor 1975). From 1977 to 1996, Pollard professor of cell biology and anatomy at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1984 interrupted by a period of research as a Guggenheim Fellow at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, England. From 1996 to 2001, Pollard Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. From 1996 to 2000 he was president of the institution, from 1997 to 2001 also an adjunct professor of biology and bioengineering and of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego, also in La Jolla. Since 2001, Pollard Professor of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Developmental Biology and Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, since 2006 as Sterling Professor.
Pollard is married and has two children.
Work
Pollard is an internationally recognized scientific leader in the field of cell biology. Its merits lie in exploring the role of actin and myosin in vivo, their polymerization in vitro, in the field of rheology and crystallography and in the development of new research methods. Recent work also deal with actin -based cell motility and molecular aspects of cytokinesis.