Robert Elliot Pollack is an American biologist whose interests cross many academic lines. He grew up in Brooklyn, attended public schools, and majored in physics at Columbia University, where he graduated from the College in 1961. He received a PhD in Biological Sciences from Brandeis University in 1966, and subsequently was a postdoctoral Fellow in Pathology with Howard Green at NYU Medical center, and at the Weizmann Institute in Israel with Ernest Winocour. He was then recruited to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory by James Watson to establish a research program on reversion of cancer cells. He became a tenured Associate Professor of Microbiology at the Stony Brook University Medical Center before returning to Columbia as a Professor of Biological Sciences in 1978. He served as Dean of Colu