Katherine Snowden Pollard is the Director of the Gladstone Institute of Data Science and Biotechnology and a professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

summa cum laude in anthropology and mathematics from Pomona College and an M.S.

She was awarded a Ph.D. in 2003 from UC Berkeley for research supervised by Mark van der Laan.

[8][2] Pollard is a leader in developing statistical models and open-source software for big data, particularly in genomics.

[11][12] Pollard has also designed methods to study the human microbiome[13][14] and other microbial communities, setting the stage for the use of metagenomics in precision medicine.