Pollard Lab

The Pollard lab’s work on the human gut microbiome was featured on ABC News. We are collaborating with Shomi Sanjabi’s lab to study changes in the gut microbiome during the onset of autoimmune disease.

Katie Pollard was featured in an Amstat News story about the benefits of postdoctoral fellowships. Amstat News is the magazine of the American Statistical Association.

The Pollard lab’s investigations into the human microbiome and its role in autoimmune diseases was covered in a news story on KQED radio. The lab is collaborating with Carlos Bustamante and colleagues to study the microbiomes of Khoisan people in South Africa (more info here).

Our collaborative work with Benoit Bruneau’s lab on the epigenetics of heart development was published in Cell and featured on ABC News.

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation awarded the Pollard lab $1.3 million for research into the global mapping of microbial functions using metagenomic data. This project is a collaboration with the laboratory of Jonathan Eisen at UC Davis that builds upon our iSEEM Project.

The Pollard lab and colleagues published the initial results of the Human Microbiome Project in Nature and PLoS ONE. We analyzed microbial community DNA from 18 body sites of 242 healthy adults living in St. Louis and Houston. The Pollard lab’s main contribution was establishment of a rigorous procedure for identifying novel types of microbes, which we used to characterize new gut bacteria, including several members of the recently discovered genus Barnesiella. Our work was featured on ABC News and was selected as the NHGRI Genomic Advance of the Month. (Press Release)

Several of our discoveries about Human Accelerated Regions were featured in a story about human evolution in the New Scientist.

Postdoc Samantha Riesenfeld was awarded an NRSA Fellowship from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to study vertebrate gene regulatory elements in collaboration with Nadav Ahituv.

The Pollard lab received a 4-year $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Mathematical Biology Program to explore the human microbiome through development of novel convex geometry and comparative genomics approaches.

Postdocs Tony Capra and Samantha Riesenfeld were both awarded Informatics Fellowships from the PhRMA Foundation.

Katie Pollard appeared on Episode 2 of The Age of the Genome, a BBC Radio special hosted by Richard Dawkins. The lab was also featured on the UCSF Science Cafe.

Our approach to studying human-chimp differences in non-coding DNA was featured in Ursula Goodenough’s NPR Blog.

The Pollard Lab and Gladstone Bioinformatics Core were awarded NHLBI funds to study the epigenetics of heart development in a collaborative project with Benoit Bruneau and others. The Gladstone team is part of a nation-wide consortium called Bench to Bassinet.

Katie Pollard was featured in a John Rubin documentary entitled What Darwin Never Knew, that aired December 29 on NOVA. She is featured in an accompanying on-line interivew about The DNA of Human Evolution. Watch the episode.

Katie Pollard appeared on the German science TV program Quarks & Co.

Katie Pollard and Nadav Ahituv received a UCSF Program for Breakthrough Biomedical Research (PBBR) Integrative Research Award. The one-year grant supports collaborative, interdisciplinary research on a high-risk topic.

Katie Pollard appeared on Are We Alone?, a SETI Radio program that aired on Public Radio station KALW.

Our research about human-chimp genetic differences was featured in the National Institutue of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) Magazine Computing Life and the NIH Biomedical Beat news digest.

Katie Pollard’s article entitled What Makes Us Human? was the Scientific American cover story in May 2009. Our comparative genomics research was featured on ABC News (click on second photo to play video).