Robert Pollack

Robert E. Pollack is professor of biological sciences, lecturer in psychiatry at the Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, adjunct professor of science and religion at Union Theological Seminary, adjunct professor of religion at Columbia University, and Director of the Center for the Study of Science and Religion at Columbia University. Dr. Pollack graduated from Columbia University with a B.A. in physics, and received a Ph.D. in biology from Brandeis University.

He has been a professor of biological sciences at Columbia since 1978, and was dean of Columbia College from 1982–1989. He received the Alexander Hamilton Medal from Columbia University, and has held a Guggenheim Fellowship. He currently is on the advisory boards of Columbia/Barnard Hillel, the Fred Friendly Seminars, and has been a Senior Consultant for the Director, Program of Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is a Fellow of the AAAS, and the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Pollack is the author of Signs of Life: The Languages and Meanings of DNA (Houghton Mifflin/Viking Penguin, 1994), The Missing Moment: How the Unconscious Shapes Modern Science (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), and The Faith of Biology and the Biology of Faith: Meaning, Order and Free Will in Modern Medical Science (Columbia University Press, 2000). Signs of Life received the Lionel Trilling Award and has been translated into six languages.