Pollak is the co-founder of The Commons Project Foundation, a Senior Researcher-in-Residence at Cornell Tech and Assistant Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at Weill Cornell Medicine.
Pollak builds tools and conducts research to help individuals collect and make use of their health data. He is one of the creators of CommonHealth, the Android app for collecting, storing, and sharing health records. He is a co-lead of VCI, developing and advocating for SMART Health Cards used by 500M+ people around the world to share verifiable health information. His research focuses on the user side of the collection and utilization of real world data in clinical research and care, and the tools resulting from his work, such as PAM and ResearchStack, have been used by hundreds of thousands of participants in clinical and behavioral research studies. Pollak earned a Master’s in Human-Computer Interaction and a PhD in Information Science at Cornell University.