Office: 1 Lewis Hall Phone: 406-994-7332
Email: jpm@cns.montana.edu
Education: University of California, Berkeley, Ca., B.A. in Physics,
University of California, San Diego, Ca., Ph.D. in Biology, Al Selverston, Advisor
National Institutes of Health, Math Research Branch, Bethesda, MD. Postdoctoral fellow. Wilfrid Rall and John Rinzel, advisors
Research
Publications
Professor of Neuroscience, and
Director, Center for Computational Biology, Montana State University,
Bozeman.
Dr. Miller joined the MSU faculty in January of 1997 to become the founding Director of the Center for Computational Biology. He is an active research neuroscientist, focusing on the biological mechanisms underlying information processing in nervous systems, using experimental and theoretical analyses. His research program is currently funded through grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. He has published many research articles in a variety of scientific journals, including the Journal of Neurophysiology, the Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Computational Neuroscience, P.N.A.S., Nature, and Science.
Dr. Miller received his B.A. in Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1972. He received his Ph.D. in Biology at the University of California, San Diego, 1980. His thesis advisor was Dr. Allen I. Selverston, and his research involved an analysis of the mechanisms underlying pattern generation in the lobster stomatogastric ganglion. After completing his thesis research, Dr. Miller was awarded an NIH extramural fellowship to do postdoctoral research in the Math Research Branch at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD., from 1981-1982. His co-sponsors were Dr. Wilfrid Rall and Dr. John Rinzel, both of whom are mathematicians working on neurobiological problems. It was during this post-doctoral research that Dr. Miller first began to carry out computational modeling studies of nerve cells.
Dr. Miller went back to Berkeley to take a faculty position in the Department of Zoology (and, upon reorganization of the Biological Sciences departments at Berkeley, in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology.) During his time at Berkeley, Dr. Miller worked on a variety of neurobiological problems ranging from the mechanisms underlying long-term potentiation to sensory encoding. He was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship to support his early research. Since joining the Berkeley faculty, he has had continuous funding from a variety of agencies, including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Epilepsy Foundation of America, and the Office of Naval Research.
Dr. Miller served in several executive administrative positions while at Berkeley, including the Chair of the Graduate Group in Biophysics and the Chair of the Academic Senate Committee on Computing and Communications. Dr. Miller also served as a member of the National Science Foundation Panel in Behavioral and Neural Systems.
In 1994, Dr. Miller and five colleagues founded a new scientific journal: the Journal of Computational Neuroscience. JCNS has since become a major international forum for the presentation of leading research in this rapidly expanding field. Along with Dr. James Bower of Cal Tech, Dr. Miller also established and continues to coorganize another major forum for the presentation of leading research: the annual Computational Neuroscience (CNS) Meetings. The meetings were established in their current format in 1992, and continue to increase in quality and attendance.
From 1997 to 2001, Dr. Miller served on President Clinton's
Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). The charge of the
committee was to provide the President, the Office of Science and
Technology Policy, and the Federal agencies involved in CIC R&D with
guidance and advice on all areas of high performance computing,
communications, and information technologies.