Divisional Dean of Natural Sciences
As divisional dean, acting on authority delegated by the Dean of Arts and Sciences, Daniel Pollack supervises the departments, centers, and other units and programs administratively located in the College’s Natural Sciences Division. He broadly supports those units in their teaching, research, and service, and represents them with respect to personnel matters such as faculty hiring, promotion, retention, merit determination, and the awarding of sabbaticals.
Pollack belongs to the College of Arts & Sciences’ executive leadership team and, guided by the Dean, engages in collaborative decision-making and financial and strategic planning on behalf of the College. He serves on the Board of Deans and Chancellors for the UW tri-campus system and represents the Natural Sciences Division in a range of University and community initiatives. In all his work, he strives to advance the equity, justice, and inclusion mission of the College and the University.
A professor in the Department of Mathematics, Pollack previously served as the interim chair of the Department of Statistics and as chair of the Arts & Sciences College Council. Pollack's areas of research are differential geometry, mathematical general relativity, and partial differential equations. In relativity, he has focused on the study of black holes and initial data for the Einstein equations. These equations lie at the foundation of general relativity, linking the geometry of spacetime with the matter and energy present in the universe.
A native New Yorker, Pollack earned his Ph.D. in mathematics at Stanford University in 1991. He joined the University of Washington in 1996 as an assistant professor, after holding faculty positions at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Chicago. He has held visiting and research appointments at Brown University, MIT, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. He was promoted to full professor in 2006.
Visit the Natural Sciences Divisional Overview to learn more about the College of Arts & Sciences’ Natural Sciences Division.