University of California, Los AngelesJeff F. Miller

Jeff F. Miller, Ph.D., is the Fred Kavli Chair in NanoSystems Sciences, Director of the California NanoSystems Institute, and Professor of Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics at UCLA. His laboratory focuses on molecular mechanisms of bacterial pathogenesis, the evolution of functional diversity in bacteria and phage, and bio-inspired engineering of precision antibiotics. Dr. Miller received his bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from Case Western Reserve University and his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from Tufts University School of Medicine. After postdoctoral training with Dr. Stanley Falkow at Stanford, he joined the faculty at UCLA in 1990. From 2002-2014 he held the M. Philip Davis Chair in Microbiology and Immunology and served as Chair of the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics. In November, 2014, he was appointed Director of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. In 2004, Dr. Miller co-founded AvidBiotics Corp., a biotherapeutics company in South San Francisco. In 2017 AvidBiotics split to form Pylum Biosciences, a precision antibiotics company, and Xyphos Inc., an immuno-oncology company that was acquired by Astellas Pharma in December, 2019. In 2009 Dr. Miller was appointed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services to serve on the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity. From 2012-2014 he served two consecutive terms as President of the American Society for Microbiology, which represents over 40,000 members in the US and abroad. Dr. Miller is a former Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences, a member of the American Academy of Microbiology, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 2015 he was elected to membership in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.