Dr. Pollard has been awarded Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship worth $50,000 over two years.

Pollard uses computational methods to study areas of rapid evolution in the human genome. With colleagues at UC Santa Cruz, she has identified specific areas of human DNA that have undergone the most rapid change since humans and chimpanzees separated from a common ancestor.

Pollard received her bachelor's degree from Pomona College in 1995, and a master's and doctorate in biostatistics from UC Berkeley in 2000 and 2003, respectively. She carried out postdoctoral research at UC Santa Cruz, where she was part of the consortium that sequenced the chimpanzee genome. Pollard joined the faculty at UC Davis in 2005.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awards 118 Sloan Research Fellowships each year to young scientists in the areas of chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics. The fellowships are aimed at helping scientists at an early stage in their careers who show outstanding promise for making fundamental contributions to knowledge.