Pohorille was the only child of Eugenia Gartenberg, a teacher, and Maksymilian Pohorille, a professor of economics at
SGH Warsaw School of Economics. He moved to the US at the age of six and later studied physics at the
University of Warsaw, where he eventually obtained his Ph.D. in theoretical physics and structural biology under the supervision of
David Shugar. He went on to conduct postdoctoral research at the
Institut de biologie physico-chimique in Paris, where he worked in the group of
Bernard Pullman. He became an assistant professor at the
University of California, Berkeley in 1988, where he worked until 1992. He moved to the
University of California, San Francisco in the same year as a professor at the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry. In 1996, Pohorille joined the
NASA Ames Research Center, where he was a principal investigator and head of the NASA Center for Computational Astrobiology. He maintained his position at University of California, San Francisco. At NASA, Pohorille conceived and led the development of the Life Detection Knowledge Base (LDKB), a community web tool that assists the detection of the evidence of life beyond Earth. He also was a leading figure in the establishment of the NASA
Center for Life Detection, where he later became a co-director. In 2002, Pohorille received the
NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal. In 2010, he received the H. Julian Allen Award. In 2005, he became the Distinguished Lecturer at the Centre for Mathematical Modeling and the National Space Research Centre in the U.K.. In 2008, he was the Maxwell Colloquium speaker at the
University of Edinburgh. == Personal life ==