Martha E. Pollack
Dean of the School of Information 2007-10
Martha E. Pollack is a computer scientist whose research specialty is artificial intelligence.
She earned her undergraduate degree in linguistics at Dartmouth College and master's and doctoral degrees in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania, completing her PhD in 1986. Before coming to Michigan, she worked at SRI International from 1985 to 1992 and was a faculty member of the University of Pittsburgh from 1991 to 2000.
Pollack joined the U-M faculty in 2000 in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, where she served as professor and as associate chair for Computer Science and Engineering. While at EECS she received the U-M Sarah Goddard Power Award for her efforts in increasing the representation of women and underrepresented minorities in science and engineering.
In 2007, she was appointed dean of the School of Information. Among her accomplishments as dean were seeing the school safely through the 2008 recession and launching an undergraduate concentration in informatics shared with computer science and statistics, the school’s first undergraduate program since the 1940s.
Among her many career recognitions, she received the Computers and Thought Award in 1991, given every two years to an outstanding young scientist in artificial intelligence. She was elected as a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 1996, a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2012, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022.
Her contributions to the field of computer science include serving as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research from 2001 to 2005, board member of the Computing Research Association and president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence from 2009 to 2010.
In 2010, she stepped down from her deanship when she was offered the position of vice provost for academic and budgetary affairs at U-M. She served in that position for three years before being appointed provost and executive vice president in 2013.
As chief academic and chief budget officer, she spearheaded major academic initiatives such as interdisciplinary programs in interprofessional health education, Poverty Solutions and the Humanities Collaboratory and lent strong support to the university's diversity work. She initiated the creation of a new school to capitalize on U-M's strengths in environment and sustainability education and research and successfully recruited many outstanding deans. She also led efforts to attract and retain world-class scholars, reduce class size, enhance teaching and research facilities and increase financial aid while holding down tuition.
In 2017, she left U-M to accept the position as 14th president of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. At Cornell, she served as a professor of computer science, information science and linguistics. She retired from the presidency on June 30, 2024, and is president emerita. Since 2019, she has also served on the board of IBM.