Harold Pollack is the Helen Ross Professor at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. He is also an Affiliate Professor in the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division and the Department of Public Health Sciences.
Co-founder of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, he is co-director of the University of Chicago Health Lab. He is a committee member of the Center for Health Administration Studies (CHAS) at the University of Chicago. His current NIH-funded research concerns improved services for individuals at the boundaries of the behavioral health and criminal justice systems, disabilities, and two major new efforts to address the opioid epidemic in Illinois and across the nation.
Past President of the Health Politics and Policy section of the American Political Science Association, Professor Pollack has been appointed to three committees of the National Academy of Sciences. He received his undergraduate degree, magna cum laude, in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University. He holds master's and doctorate degrees in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Before coming to Crown Family School, Professor Pollack was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research at Yale University and taught Health Management and Policy at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.
He has published widely at the interface between poverty policy and public health. His research appears in such journals as Addiction, Journal of the American Medical Association, American Journal of Public Health, Health Services Research, Pediatrics, and Social Service Review. His journalism regularly appears in such outlets as Washington Post, the Nation, the New York Times, New Republic, and other popular publications. His American Prospect essay, "Lessons from an Emergency Room Nightmare" was selected for the collection Best American Medical Writing, 2009.
