Pollard majored in electrical engineering at the
University of Houston, graduating in 1986. She earned a Ph.D. in computer science at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994. Her dissertation,
Parallel Methods for Synthesizing Whole-Hand Grasps from Generalized Prototypes, was supervised by
Tomás Lozano-Pérez. After working in industry for two years and then becoming a postdoctoral researcher at
Georgia Tech, she became an assistant member at
Brown University in 1998. She won a
National Science Foundation CAREER Award there in 2001, before moving to Carnegie Mellon University in 2003. ==References==