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Dr. Polan is a magna cum laude graduate of Princeton University (1974) and a 1979 graduate of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He completed his residency in psychiatry at Payne Whitney Clinic (Manhattan) in 1983, was Chief Resident from 1983 to 1984, and has served on Cornell's full time faculty and maintained an outpatient practice as a member of the Cornell faculty practice group continuously since then. He has been the Payne Whitney Clerkship Director since 1984 and Director of Medical Student Educaiton for the Department of Psychiatry since 1989. He conducted several federally and state funded projects in HIV/AIDS education for physicians and other health professionals in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He was President of the national Association of Directors of Medical Student Education in Psychiatry from 2001 to 2003.
His research interests are normal and abnormal behavior development, which initially led him to study feeding and attachment disorders of infancy with Daniel Stern and Mary J. Ward here at Cornell, then to obtain a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to study the origins of attachment behavior in infant rats in the laboratory of Myron Hofer at Columbia University's Department of Psychiatry. Now he is using molecular biology to study the development of cognitive deficits in transgenic mouse models of schizophrenia and other neurodevelopmental disorders in the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior in Eric Kandel's laboratory at Columbia. Currently he is funded by the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology and the Lieber Center for Schizophrenia Research.
He welcomes inquiries from college students, medical students, and residents who want research experience during summers or elective time.
