Katherine Pollard is director of the Gladstone Institute of Data Science & Biotechnology, investigator at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub and professor of bioinformatics at the University of California, San Francisco. Her lab develops machine learning models and open-source bioinformatics software for predictive understanding and AI-guided experimentation with an emphasize on human genetics and genomics. Previously, Pollard was an assistant professor in the University of California, Davis Genome Center and Department of Statistics.

Pollard earned her Ph.D. in biostatistics from the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) and was a comparative genomics postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was awarded the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, the Sloan Research Fellowship and the Alumna of the Year from UC Berkeley. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, International Society for Computational Biology, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and California Academy of Sciences.