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Michael I. Miller, PhD
- Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Faculty
Languages
- English
Gender
MaleAbout Michael I. Miller
Professional Titles
- Bessie Darling Massey Professor and Director, Department of Biomedical Engineering
- Co-director of the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute
Primary Academic Title
Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Background
Michael I. Miller is the Bessie Darling Massey Professor and Director of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He is also co-director of the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute.
As a biomedical engineer who specializes in data science, Dr. Miller is pioneering cutting-edge technologies in computational medicine to understand and diagnose neurodegenerative diseases. His research focuses on the functional and structural characteristics of the human brain in health and disease, including Huntington’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and epilepsy. By developing new tools to analyze patient brain scans, derived from advanced medical imaging technologies, Dr. Miller aims to predict the risk of developing neurological disorders years before the onset of clinical symptoms. His lab is currently devising cloud-based methods to build and share libraries of brain images—and the algorithms used to understand them—associated with neuropsychiatric illness. Dr. Miller’s research is highly translational, and he has co-founded four start-up companies in the past decade.
Dr. Miller has co-authored more than 300 peer-reviewed publications, as well as two highly cited textbooks on random point processes and computational anatomy. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the national Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Biomedical Engineering Thesis Award, the Johns Hopkins Paul Ehrlich Graduate Student Thesis Award, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) Presidential Young Investigator Award. He was named an inaugural Johns Hopkins University Gilman Scholar in 2011 for demonstrating a distinguished record of research, teaching, and service. He is an elected Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and the Biomedical Engineering Society.
Dr. Miller earned his B.S. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Johns Hopkins University. He was the Newton R. and Sarah L. Wilson Professor in Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis until joining Johns Hopkins University in 1998 as the founding director of the Center for Imaging Science. He was named the Herschel and Ruth Seder Professor in Biomedical Engineering in 2003, before his appointment as the director of the Department of Biomedical Engineering in 2017.
Centers and Institutes
Recent News Articles and Media Coverage
Video: Tomorrow's Discoveries: Using Data to Diagnose Brain Diseases - Dr. Michael I. Miller (May 2019)
Video: Johns Hopkins Biomedical Engineering is Engineering the Future of Medicine (October, 2017)
Article: Michael Miller named IEEE Fellow (December 2019)
Article: Seven from Hopkins BME receive Discovery Awards (June 2019)
Article: Brain changes linked with Alzheimer's years before symptoms appear (May 2019)
Article: Michael Miller announces vision for a new era in biomedical engineering: BME 2.0 (October, 2017)
Additional Academic Titles
Joint Appointment in Neuroscience
Contact for Research Inquiries
Phone: (443) 255-1615
BME-Director@jhu.edu
Research Summary
Michael I. Miller's research expertise lies at the intersection of biomedical data science, neuroengineering, and data-driven medicine. Using medical imaging data and computational approaches to brain mapping, Dr. Miller and his lab develop non-invasive technologies and clinical biomarkers that can predict patient risk and track progression of neurological disorders.
Dr. Miller’s early work with Murray Sachs on neural codes provided the first complete representation of voiced pitch and stop consonants in the brainstem. These codes formed the basis for signal processing in modern cochlear implants, arguably the most successful neuroprosthetic device to date as they allow many children with profound hearing loss to participate fully in mainstream society. Dr. Miller continued these efforts in brain mapping by developing computational tools to understand and predict how anatomical changes in the medial temporal lobe and other subcortical structures lead to the development and progression of neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington’s and Alzheimer’s. The field of computational anatomy grew out of Dr. Miller’s work as a modern way to derive sensitive biomarkers of disease from metrics of anatomy obtained by clinical imaging. Dr. Miller and his colleagues were the first to show that clinical MRI can detect medial temporal lobe pathology for staging of Alzheimer’s more than 10 years before symptom onset. This translational work influenced the diagnostic criteria for Alzheimer’s disease developed by the NIH in 2011 and offers the promise that preclinical disease can be predicted and managed via non-invasive clinical imaging.
Selected Publications
Bakker A, Kirwan CB, Miller M, Stark CE (2008) Pattern separation in the human hippocampal CA3 and dentate gyrus. Science 319(5870):1640-1642.
Tang X, Ross CA, Johnson H, Paulsen JS, Younes L, Albin RL, Ratnanather JT, Miller MI (2019) Regional subcortical shape analysis in premanifest Huntington's disease. Hum Brain Mapp 40(5):1419-1433.
Tward DJ, Sicat CS, Brown T, Bakker A, Gallagher M, Albert M, Miller MI (2017) Entorhinal and transentorhinal atrophy in mild cognitive impairment using longitudinal diffeomorphometry. Alzheimers Dement (Amst) 9:41-50.
Younes L, Albert M, Miller MI, BIOCARD Research Team (2014) Inferring changepoint times of medial temporal lobe morphometric change in preclinical Alzheimer’s disease. Neuroimage Clin 5:178-187.
Younes L, Albert M, Moghekar A, Soldan A, Pettigrew C, Miller MI (2019) Identifying changepoints in biomarkers during the preclinical phase of Alzheimer's disease. Front Aging Neurosci 11:74.