Gregory E. Miller
Greg Miller is the Louis W. Menk Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of the Foundations of Health Research Center at Northwestern. His research focuses on early-life stressors related to poverty, and how they reverberate across the lifespan to influence disease risks.
In recognition of the pronounced inequalities in health in the United States, the goals of Miller's research are to (a) identify the mechanistic origins of these gaps, and (b) use that knowledge to inform policies and practices which can mitigate them. To do that, his team integrates concepts and approaches from across the social and biological sciences. Broadly speaking, they try to understand how structural forces, acting through individual experience, affect disease pathogenesis. Their approaches range from the macro (e.g., mapping neighborhood exposures to violent crime and police misconduct) to the micro (e.g., transcriptional profiling of monocytes to identify drivers of inflammation, fMRI to identify circuits involved in brain-immune crosstalk). Much of the research led by Miller occurs in the context of risk for cardiovascular diseases, although they also have studies in the context of perinatal health and childhood asthma. All of this research takes a lifecourse perspective, asking how conditions in childhood initiate and maintain pathogenic mechanisms that contribute to disease.
Miller has received a number of honors and awards for his research, including the Young Investigator Award from the Society for Behavioral Medicine, Herbert Weiner Early Career Award from the American Psychosomatic Society, and Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions to Health Psychology from the American Psychological Association. In 2016 and 2018, he was named a highly cited researcher by Clarivate Analytics, a designation for authors whose article citation rates were in top 1 percent of their field. His research has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, and Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Miller was President of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research from 2015-16.
Miller completed a clinical internship at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic and a subsequent postdoctoral fellowship in health psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. Before joining Northwestern, he was a faculty member at Washington University in St. Louis from 2000 to 2003 and at the University of British Columbia from 2003 to 2012.