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Molecular evolution and comparative genomics.
Other Pollock pages: BMG, CBP , PMB
Links: CCG, CERT
David began his career as an undergraduate in Allan Wilson's laboratory at UC Berkeley (BA in Biochemistry, 1986), followed by research with S.J. O'Brien and Bill Modi at the National Cancer Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from Stanford University in 1995 working with Ward Watt and Marc Feldman. After a brief stint at the Interval Research Corporation he spent three years at the National Institute for Medical Research in London and UC Berkeley on a Hitchings-Elion Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust working with Willie Taylor, Nick Goldman, and Monty Slatkin. He then spent almost two years at Los Alamos National Laboratories on a Director's Fellowship, followed by six years at Louisiana State University prior to coming to the University of Colorado. Dr. Pollock's research interests are in evolutionary genomics and molecular evolution, particularly the interaction between protein sequence, structure, and function, and molecular coevolution within and between proteins. His lab employs both wet-lab and computational research. Computational approaches include development of phylogeny-based context-dependent likelihood and Bayesian approaches to analysis of sequence evolution, "conditional pathways", MCMC, mixture models, hidden Markov models, Markov random fields, mathematical analysis of population genetics, simulation, and molecular dynamic and lattice-based evaluation of protein stability and function in a thermodynamic context. Current study systems include vertebrate mitochondrial genomes, cytochrome oxidase, photolyase, HIV protease, and lysozyme. David is a founding member of consortia to analyze the upcoming Monodelphis domestica and Anolis carolinensis complete genomes, and recently organized the Consortium for Comparative Genomics to enhance genomics research in Colorado. He is also a founding member of CERT, the Colorado Evolutionary Response Team. David has over 50 research publications in journals such as Nature, PNAS, Genome Research, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics, Genetics, J. Molecular Biology, Molecular Biology and Evolution and Human Genomics. |
