New York, NY, May 1, 2003 -- A small green face with bulging white eyes peers around the door of Prof. Daniel Pollack’s office. It is a hand puppet of Sesame Street’s Kermit the Frog, brought to life by Prof. Pollack whenever students’ or faculty members’ young children pass his office in Belfer Hall, home to YU’s Wurzweiler School of Social Work. “I do it to make them feel more comfortable when they come here,” Prof. Pollack says. “The offices must look quite unfriendly to a small child.” The associate professor of social work does such a convincing Kermit impression that, even after he emerges from behind the door to reveal his closely-cropped beard and slightly graying hair, children continue to talk back to the garrulous puppet in his right hand. Such a creative approach comes easily to a father of two small children, but it says a lot about Prof. Pollack’s ability to leap from child’s play to serious intelle ctual study. The desire to find a more rigorous framework for helping people in need led him to pursue his JD in 1978, just one year after he received his master’s in social work. “Social work is a skeleton that needs more meat, and the meat is rigor and discipline,” says Prof. Pollack. “It is research that is reality-based, that makes a difference. It’s not research just for the sake of writing articles and getting them published. It’s the marriage of one discipline to the other that I find interesting.” Prof. Pollack spent 15 years working in state and human-service agencies and departments before joining Wurzweiler’s faculty in 1992. As the assistant general counsel to the Ohio Department of Youth Services in Columbus, he worked extensively with the state’s juvenile courts on cases of abuse, theft, and drug use, and handled arbitration and union matters and real estate deals. Before that, he was executive assistant to the Ohio Governor for health and human services, providing legal advice on mental health and aging. Such issues dominate his research. Prof. Pollack is a prolific writer, publishing regularly in social work and law journals and addressing conferences across the country. He also writes two regular columns, has published two books, co-edits Wurzweiler’s Social Work Forum journal, and edits Jlaw.com, a Web site on Halakhah (Jewish law) and American law. Earlier this year, he became a senior fellow of the Center for Adoption Research at the University of Massachusetts. Marrying Law and Social Work Unique among Wurzweiler faculty for his expertise in law and social work, he applies these twin insights to his MSW courses, as well as in classes he teaches at YU’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and Azrieli Graduate School of Jewish Education and Administration.