Lois Pollack: Conversion of a 'traditional physicist'

Physicist Lois Pollack readies an X-ray solution scattering experiment in the D Line of the CHESS laboratory. Laura Brown/CHESS

By Roger Segelken

When Lois Pollack launched a new course, the Physics of Life, she was aiming at sophomore-level undergraduates. An assistant professor of applied and engineering physics, she was surprised on the first day of class to find graduate as well as undergraduate students in fields ranging from materials science to operations research. All were eager to explore the physical interactions within and among biological macromolecules.

A member of the Physical Sciences/Life Sciences Interface program under the New Life Sciences Initiative, Pollack believes there will be many more opportunities for cross-disciplinary learning as the new research-and-education environment blending life sciences with physical, engineering and computational sciences spreads across campus.

She was contentedly working as a "traditional physicist," Pollack recalls, until her "conversion" about five years ago, when she started attending biophysics seminars at Cornell. There she discovered an unfilled need for a physicist's perspective in solving big biological problems on a very small scale, such as her current research question: How does RNA fold?

Working in the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source with X-ray solution scattering devices she builds in the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility -- and with intellectual support from biologists and biochemists -- Pollack watches as free-floating molecules of RNA change shape, a millisecond at a time. What she's discovering about the fundamentals of macromolecular folding might one day help drug designers create RNA-based treatments to fight viral diseases.

In a room filled with physical scientists, engineers and life scientists of every type, "we all see things slightly differently," Pollack said. "But we're finally learning to communicate."