1970s - Pollock

In a biographical sketch for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Daniel A. Pollock, M.D. ’79, described a change in his career as follows: “In my work [as an emergency physician], I saw the same injury types again and again and again. As a result, I thought it would be important to learn injury demographics and causes, and to find ways to prevent injuries, instead of continually treating them and trying to limit their effects.” This conviction led him from a position as an instructor of clinical medicine at New York University School of Medicine to a stint in the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the CDC in 1984. For two years, he worked on the Agent Orange Projects. He then continued within the CDC to become the team leader of the Acute Care Team within the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC). Since 1999, he has served as the acting director of the NCIPC’s Division of Acute Care, Rehabilitation Research, and Disability Prevention, which provides national leadership in preventing and minimizing the impact of nonoccupational injuries. His goal is to engineer a shift in the way medicine is taught and researched toward a population orientation that includes prevention and complements the clinical approach of treating one patient at a time.