Steve Pollard obtained his PhD in zebrafish genetics from the MRC National Institute for Medical Research. He was a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh with Prof Austin Smith, where he first began studying mammalian neural stem cells. As a Wellcome Beit Fellow at the University of Cambridge he focused on neural stem cells and glioblastoma. He established his own research group at the UCL Cancer Institute, before moving in 2013 to the University of Edinburgh. Steve holds a CRUK Senior Fellowship, and in 2017 was awarded the Chair of Stem Cell and Cancer Biology. His laboratory continues to study the molecular and cellular mechanisms that regulate neural stem self-renewal and differentiation, and how these operate in the context of human brain tumours.