On the Origin of James Poolner

When we first meet James Poolner, we ask him how he’d like to be addressed. “Jim,” he says, then changes his mind. “Or James,” he corrects. “Most people know me as James, but I kind of bifurcated my work name and my home name.”

“So call me James, actually, just because that’s more recognizable,” he tells us.

With his long, curly hair, black knit beanie, and full white beard, Poolner could easily pass for a Jack Black-esque garage band rocker (which he was, to be fair, and still is).

To students, however, he is Harvard’s Program Coordinator for the Integrative Biology and Neuroscience Concentrations, a position he has officially held since 2000. Perhaps most famously, Poolner is also the man behind Life Sciences Announcements, a weekly email blasted to around 500 people.

Adorned with emojis, Poolner’s emails are full of witticisms and thoughtful asides. “Prepare for it to start feeling like actual-October outside,” he wrote in his most recent announcement. “If I see any good ideas for biology-themed Halloween costumes, I’ll let you know.”

At the end of each update, he includes a “Procrastination Station” where he compiles a few scientific articles on interesting topics for students’ perusal — livestreams of bears catching salmon in rivers, perhaps, or an article on a type of surgery that restores vision by implanting teeth into patients’ eye sockets.

His love for the announcements is clear; after our interview, he sends us a long email with eight example updates and five samples of the Procrastination Station. “It’s one of my favorite parts of the job,” he writes.

With over 40 alumni requesting to remain on the distribution list, it seems that his enthusiasm has left an impact on the student body.

Poolner’s journey to his current career was not a straight road, but a curved path. His origin story began in Boston, where he was one of a handful of Jewish students in a Catholic school. He would graduate and continue on to Carnegie Mellon University, where he studied physics and mathematics for a year before dropping out and returning to Boston.

Back home, he traded 20-hour study days for two years of work at a self-serve gas station.“During those two years, I read a lot of everything — science, literature,” he said.

“That’s where I can pinpoint my real kind of ‘I want to get back into an academic kind of environment where people are learning stuff and exchanging ideas.’” Poolner’s desire to learn led him back to academia. He studied English and television production at Boston University.

Across the river at Boston’s public radio station WGBH, Poolner helped develop different media projects and science documentaries. There he engaged in research assistance and was exposed to “hours and hours of interviews and raw footage from places like NASA or the Smithsonian,” he says. Although Poolner found this work fulfilling, he decided to transition to a new environment. “The pay for research assistants and production assistants in media is very low. You don’t really start getting paid well until you’re about 20 years into the thing. And I just started a family, and that wasn’t viable.”

Poolner then became a temporary worker through Harvard’s contingent workforce program. He grew in familiarity with work in multiple administrative departments. “I worked at about 40 different offices over the period of two years,” he tells us.

Now an expert on all things Harvard administration, Poolner became a program coordinator for Integrative Biology and Neuroscience, fully committing himself to a science-centered environment.

Poolner may not work in the realm of entertainment or production anymore, but he still maintains a connection to the creative arts through a long-held passion of his: music. About halfway through our conversation, we notice a glossy white guitar with an angled top handle sitting on the floor behind Poolner.

The guitar is a Parker Fly, he tells us, a rare, now-discontinued model known for its lightweight frame and unique “double-cutaway” design. He acquired the guitar two years ago when his car was stolen. Upon retrieving the vehicle, Poolner found that the thief had left the Parker Fly behind. He attempted to contact the original owner, giving the thief a year to collect his guitar — but when 15 months passed with no response, Poolner gladly claimed the guitar as his own.

“It looked like a piece of crap that you’d get from Walmart or something like that,” he recalls. “But then I looked it up online, and I saw that it’s a really rare guitar.” He shakes his head, smiling to himself. “When I got it plugged in and playing, it’s like, I can’t believe this landed in my lap.”

Much like his guitar, Poolner has a deep musical background. From 1994 to 1996, he was a member of The In Out, a local Boston indie band that was featured on Harvard Radio WHRB in June of 1995. The band reached national and international audiences when they toured as an opening act for the indie rock group Sebadoh in 1999. Though Poolner had already departed the group by then, he rejoined a revived version of The In Out seven years ago and has begun to make music with them once more. On BandCamp, their recent music conveys a psychedelic indie flavor that’s hard to categorize.

To Poolner, music serves a dual purpose: it is both a bridge to the science he encounters at work and a form of recreational enjoyment.

“I think having a brain that processes math more easily has a better — I have a better — framework by which I can take apart music and analyze it in my head,” he says. “There’s a lot of intersection between math when I’m really trying to cobble something together, and less so when I’m just playing for fun.”

This year marks 25 years working at Harvard. Although he left his job at WGBH more than two decades ago, he said he would still consider returning to the world of science media. “I’m not going to just walk away from my job. But if the opportunity presented itself to me that I could do a video podcast or something like that on science —I would take that opportunity.”

Ultimately, however, Poolner is content with his current life — and the human connections he makes at Harvard.

“I try to be much more of a good influence than I think I am necessarily,” Poolner says.

“I like being around people who are learning. And so there’s that kind of joy of learning new stuff, of presenting new stuff. Being around that atmosphere is really heartening,” he says.