Sterling Professor Pollard Named Dean of Graduate School

President Richard C. Levin wrote to the Graduate School Community today announcing the new Dean of the Graduate School:

It gives me great pleasure to announce the appointment of Thomas D. Pollard, M.D., Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology, and Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and Cell Biology, as the new Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Professor Pollard was born in Pasadena, California and graduated with a B.A. in chemistry and zoology, cum laude, from Pomona College before heading east, where he earned his M.D., cum laude, from Harvard Medical School. After an internship in internal medicine but always a scientist at heart, Professor Pollard spent a few years at the National Heart and Lung Institute in Bethesda, MD, followed by five years as a faculty member at Harvard Medical School. In 1977 he founded and directed the first department of cell biology at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. During 19 years in Baltimore he was also the founding director of the Graduate Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine and won numerous teaching awards. He returned to southern California in 1996 to serve as the President of The Salk Institute for Biological Studies and Adjunct Professor at the University of California San Diego. Tom moved to Yale in 2001 as the Eugene Higgins Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology and Cell Biology. He was the co-director of the Yale graduate track in Molecular Cell Biology, Genetics and Development from its founding in 2002 until 2006. Since 2004, Tom has been the chair of MCDB and he was named Sterling Professor in 2005.

Starting as an undergraduate student, Professor Pollard and his laboratory colleagues have used a combination of biochemical, biophysical, cellular and genetic experiments to investigate the molecular basis of cellular motility and cytokinesis. He has been recognized widely by the scientific community, receiving awards such as the 2004 E.B. Wilson Medal from the American Society of Cell Biology and the 2006 Gairdner International Award, where he was cited with Alan Hall of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, for “discovering the molecular basis of cellular motility and the mechanism of its regulation,” which are critical for understanding embryonic development, the spread of malignant tumors in our bodies, and how humans defend against infections.

In addition, Tom has been active in many scientific organizations, including serving as president of both the American Society for Cell Biology and the Biophysical Society, and, for five years during the 1990s, he chaired the Commission on Life Sciences of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a long time fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine. The second edition of the Pollard and Earnshaw textbook Cell Biology was published in 2007.

Tom and his wife Patty, President of the Yale University Women’s Organization, are the proud parents of two computational biologists, Katie Pollard of the University of California San Francisco and Dan Pollard of New York University.

I know that you will join me in welcoming your new dean. He looks forward to working with all faculty, staff and students in the Graduate School, while remaining passionate about his own research and the promise of the sciences at Yale. I am confident that Professor Pollard will embrace enthusiastically the rewards and challenges of his new position.

I want to thank the search committee for their excellent work. After meeting and seeking advice from many around the University, several committee members and others told me in confidence that the committee chair, Professor Pollard, was absolutely the best candidate for the dean’s position, and they hoped I could persuade him to assume this role. So I am especially in their debt for their thoughtfulness, time and effort. The committee included Joseph Altonji, Thomas Dewitt Cuyler Professor of Economics; Keith Baker, Professor of Physics; Timothy Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art; Susan Baserga, Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, Genetics, and Therapeutic Radiology; Howard Bloch, Chairman of the Humanities Program and Sterling Professor of French; James Duncan, Professor of Diagnostic Radiology and the Ebenezer K. Hunt Professor of Biomedical Engineering; Amy Hungerford, Professor of English and American Studies; Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Professor of Psychology; David Schatz, Professor of Immunobiology and Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; and Elisabeth Wood, Professor of Political Science, International and Area Studies, and Sociology.

We still have ample time to celebrate Jon Butler for his six years of service as the Dean of the Graduate School. I would be remiss, however, if I did not express my thanks now for his superb service. Jon has been an outstanding dean, always attentive to the needs of all those in the Graduate School, creating strong collaborations with Yale College, and always imagining and then implementing changes in graduate education, making the Graduate School a better place.