Founder(s) | Adolph C. Miller and Mary Sprague Miller |
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Established | 1955 |
The Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science was established on the University of California, Berkeley, campus in 1955 after Adolph C. Miller and his wife, Mary Sprague Miller, made a donation to the university. It was their wish that the donation be used to establish an institute "dedicated to the encouragement of creative thought and conduct of pure science".
The Miller Institute sponsors Miller Research Professors, Visiting Miller Professors and Miller Research Fellows. The first appointments of Miller Professors were made in January 1957. In 2008 the institute created the Miller Senior Fellow program. This program is aimed differently, but is still within the institute's general purpose of supporting excellence in science at Berkeley. The Senior Fellow advances that goal by providing selected faculty with significant discretionary research funds as recognition of distinction in scientific research. The first five-year award went to Professor Randy Schekman, illustrating the high standard of the Senior Fellows. The 2010 Miller Senior Fellow, Saul Perlmutter, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011. He shares the prize with former Miller Fellow Adam Riess (MF 1996–98) and Brian Schmidt. Randy Schekman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2013.
The Miller Institute invites faculty from around the world to submit nominations for Miller Fellows. Fellowships are intended for exceptional young scientists newly awarded the doctoral degree and are selected on the basis of their academic achievement and the promise of their scientific research. The institute seeks to discover and encourage individuals of outstanding talent, and to provide them with the opportunity to pursue their research on the Berkeley campus. Each Miller Fellow is sponsored by an academic department on the Berkeley campus and performs his or her research in the facilities provided by the host Berkeley faculty member. [1]
In 1985, Miller Fellow Steven A. Wasserman, his Berkeley faculty host, Nick Cozzarelli, and colleagues published a paper in science entitled, "Discovery of a Predicted DNA Knot Substantiates a Model for Site-Specific Recombination". The paper included an electron micrograph of a single length of double-stranded DNA in six-noded knot. This was photographed at x40,000 primary magnification. [2]
During a talk by Cozzarelli, Nobel Prize winner, Ilya Prigogine was in the audience. He mentioned that in his private art collection he had a 3rd-century A.D. Roman bas relief which showed the identical knot form described in the paper. A photograph of this bas relief became the cover art for the July 12, 1985 issue of Science. [3]
That same year, the Miller Institute was publishing its 30 Year Report and Executive Director Robert Ornduff used the knot on its cover. It was not used again until the early 1990s, when it was rediscovered among many potential logo options and was selected to thereafter be used as the Miller Institute's logo.
In 1999, Visiting Miller Professor and Knot Theorist, Dror Bar-Natan, dubbed the knot "The Miller Knot". It has since gained a bit of notoriety as can be seen in several links:
Leland Harrison (Lee) Hartwell is former president and director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. He shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Paul Nurse and Tim Hunt, for their discoveries of protein molecules that control the division (duplication) of cells.
Gabor A. Somorjai is a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a leading researcher in the field of surface chemistry and catalysis, especially the catalytic effects of metal surfaces on gas-phase reactions. For his contributions to the field, Somorjai won the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 1998, the Linus Pauling Award in 2000, the National Medal of Science in 2002, the Priestley Medal in 2008, the 2010 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Science and the NAS Award in Chemical Sciences in 2013. In April 2015, Somorjai was awarded the American Chemical Society's William H. Nichols Medal.
James Edward Rothman is an American biochemist. He is the Fergus F. Wallace Professor of Biomedical Sciences at Yale University, the Chairman of the Department of Cell Biology at Yale School of Medicine, and the Director of the Nanobiology Institute at the Yale West Campus. Rothman also concurrently serves as adjunct professor of physiology and cellular biophysics at Columbia University and a research professor at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London.
Randy Wayne Schekman is an American cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, former editor-in-chief of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and former editor of Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology. In 2011, he was announced as the editor of eLife, a new high-profile open-access journal published by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust launching in 2012. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992. Schekman shared the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with James Rothman and Thomas C. Südhof for their ground-breaking work on cell membrane vesicle trafficking.
Armand Paul Alivisatos is an American chemist and academic administrator who has served as the 14th president of the University of Chicago since September 2021. He is a pioneer in nanomaterials development and an authority on the fabrication of nanocrystals and their use in biomedical and renewable energy applications. He was ranked fifth among the world's top 100 chemists for the period 2000–2010 in the list released by Thomson Reuters.
Roger David Kornberg is an American biochemist and professor of structural biology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Kornberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2006 for his studies of the process by which genetic information from DNA is copied to RNA, "the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription."
Carolyn Widney Greider is an American molecular biologist and Nobel laureate. She joined the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Distinguished Professor in the department of molecular, cell, and developmental biology in October 2020.
John Kuriyan is the Dean of Basic Sciences and a Professor of Biochemistry at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. He was formerly the Chancellor's Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the departments of Molecular and Cell Biology (MCB) and Chemistry, a Faculty Scientist in Berkeley Lab's Physical Biosciences Division, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and he has also been on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2009, 2019 and 2020.
Cornelis "Cees" Dekker is a Dutch physicist, and Distinguished University Professor at the Technical University of Delft. He is known for his research on carbon nanotubes, single-molecule biophysics, and nanobiology.
The Miller Research Fellows program is the central program of the Adolph C. and Mary Sprague Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science on the University of California Berkeley campus. The program constitutes the support of Research Fellows - a group of the world's most brilliant young scientists. Each year, eight to ten Miller Research Fellows are chosen from hundreds of nominations in all areas of science based on the promise of their scientific research. The Fellowships are three-year appointments, during which the young scientists launch their careers, being mentored by Berkeley's faculty and making use of the facilities at the university. A few Fellows stay on as new Berkeley faculty. Most move on to contribute to faculty positions at other reputed institutions around the world. Other comparable programs are the Harvard Junior Fellows and the Junior Fellowship Program at the University of Cambridge. To date, there have been over 500 Miller Fellows from all areas of science since the inception of the program in 1960. Carl Sagan was among the first group of Fellows in the program. Along with the Miller Fellows, the Miller Institute also supports Miller Professorships for selected Berkeley faculty, Miller Visiting Professorships, and Miller Senior Fellows. In all, the institute has supported more than 1000 scientists, including multiple Nobel Prize winners, nine Fields Medalists and dozens of National Academy of Sciences members.
Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan is an Indian-American scientist. He is currently the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Physics at Harvard University. His work centers around understanding the organization of matter in space and time. Mahadevan is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow.
David Jay Julius is an American physiologist and Nobel Prize laureate known for his work on molecular mechanisms of pain sensation and heat, including the characterization of the TRPV1 and TRPM8 receptors that detect capsaicin, menthol, and temperature. He is a professor at the University of California, San Francisco.
Jennifer Anne Doudna is an American biochemist who has done pioneering work in CRISPR gene editing, and made other fundamental contributions in biochemistry and genetics. Doudna was one of the first women to share a Nobel in the sciences. She received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with Emmanuelle Charpentier, "for the development of a method for genome editing." She is the Li Ka Shing Chancellor's Chair Professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1997.
Inder Mohan Verma is an Indian American molecular biologist, the former Cancer Society Professor of Molecular Biology in the Laboratory of Genetics at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of California, San Diego. He is recognized for seminal discoveries in the fields of cancer, immunology, and gene therapy.
Tasuku Honjo is a Japanese physician-scientist and immunologist. He won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and is best known for his identification of programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1). He is also known for his molecular identification of cytokines: IL-4 and IL-5, as well as the discovery of activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID) that is essential for class switch recombination and somatic hypermutation.
Robert Eric Betzig is an American physicist who works as a professor of physics and professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a senior fellow at the Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia.
Mariel Vázquez is a Mexican mathematical biologist who specializes in the topology of DNA. She is a professor at the University of California, Davis, jointly affiliated with the departments of mathematics and of microbiology and molecular genetics.
Peter Novick is an American scientist who holds the George Palade Endowed Chair in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests focus on the biology of cell membranes, particularly the secretory pathway and other aspects of membrane trafficking and intracellular transport.
Susan Ferro-Novick is an American scientist who is a Distinguished Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. Her research interests focus on the biology of cell membranes and their responses to cell stress, particularly related to membrane trafficking in the secretory and autophagy pathways, as well as a quality control pathway known as ER-phagy in the endoplasmic reticulum.