Pollack is president emerita of Cornell University. Before taking up the presidency at Cornell, she was provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of Michigan. Prior to becoming an administrator, Pollack conducted research on artificial intelligence and served as the president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
 
As president of Cornell, she prioritized freedom of expression, one of the six core university values articulated in 2019, and made this topic a university-wide theme for the 2023–2024 academic year. A highly interdisciplinary researcher, her undergraduate major at Dartmouth was linguistics, and she has had a career-long interest in language, conversation, and communication.