2022 - 2023 News

Below is a list of our Miller members who have recently received awards or who have been highlighted in the media. Also, the Miller Newsletters is another way to find out what is currently happening in our Miller Community.

  • David Drubin (Miller Professor 2021-2022) received the 2023 Keith R. Porter Lecture Award from the The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB). This award is named in memory of Keith R. Porter and presented to an outstanding and innovative leader at the forefront of cell biology, actively contributing fundamental new knowledge to our understanding of cell biology.

  • Alfred Zong (Miller Fellow 2020-2023) was recently interviewed at the CLEO Conference in San Jose organized by Optica (formerly known as the Optical Society of America), where he shared his experience as a Miller Postdoc Fellow.

  • Ray Jayawardhana (Miller Fellow 2000-2002), renowned astrophysicist and accomplished academic leader, named as Johns Hopkins University's 16th provost.

  • Luis Caffarelli (Advisory Board Member 2017-2022) was announced as the winner of the Abel Prize, given by the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters and considered the “Nobel of mathematics.”

  • Corrie Moreau (Miller Fellow 2007-2008) was a guest of Who's Missing? podcast. The episode "The Cornell University Insect Collection" was focused on discussing being a first generation college student, empowering women to pursue a career in science, and of course: her love of ants and bugs.

  • Iwnetim (Tim) Abate (Miller Fellow 2021-2024) was selected to be part of the Talented 12.

  • Moon Duchin (2023 Symposium Speaker), the first mathematician in US history to be mentioned 46 times in a Supreme Court decision.

  • A 2022 paper by Jeffrey Townsend (Miller Fellow 2002–2004) on "Attribution of Cancer Origins to Endogenous, Exogenous, and Preventable Mutational Processes", published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, provided the first patient-specific approach to answering a question many individuals ask when diagnosed with cancer—why me? The research was awarded the 2023 Yale School of Public Health Reduce Disease Risk Award.

  • Yao Yang's (Miller Fellow 2021-2024) recent discovery, "Catalyst Chemistry Could Turn Emissions into Green Fuels," was highlighted by the Kavli Foundation.

  • The U.S. National Science Foundation has selected Susan Marqusee (Miller Professor 2016-2017, Miller Senior Fellow 2019-present) to head the Directorate for Biological Sciences. "Susan Marqusee’s vast experience will be a monumental benefit to NSF and our effort to tackle some of the most complex societal challenges."

  • Meredith Hughes (Miller Fellow 2010-2013) was recognized by Wesleyan University as one of the recipients of the Binswanger Prizes for Excellence in Teaching.

  • Current and former Miller members elected to the National Academy of Sciences:

    • Emily Brodsky (Miller Fellow 2001-2002)
    • Michael Crandall (Miller Professor 1996)
    • Marla Feller (Miller Fellow 1994-1996, current Executive Director 2017-2023)
    • Robert Kass (Visiting Miller Professor 2005)
    • Philip Kim (Miller Fellow 1999-2001, incoming Visiting Miller Professor 2023)
    • Jeffrey Long (Miller Professor 2011, 2021-2022, currect Executive Committee member 2022-2025)
    • Sir Richard Roberts (Visiting Miller Professor 1991)
    • Don Tilley (Miller Professor 2004-2005)
    • David Weinberg (Miller Fellow 1990-1991, Visiting Miller Professor 2022)
    • Hugh Woodin (Miller Professor 1997-1998)

  • Former Miller Members - Venkat Guruswami (Miller Fellow 2001-2002) and Julius Lucks (Miller Fellow 2007-2010) are the 2023 John Simon Guggenheim Fellows.

  • Former Miller Members - Jonathan Bland-Hawthorn (Visiting Miller Professor 2018), Marla Feller (Miller Fellow 1994-1996, Executive Director 2017 - Present), Shana Kelley (Somorjai Visiting Miller Professor 2017), Dung-Hai Lee (Miller Professor 1999), Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan (Visiting Miller Professor 2006) - have been elected as new fellows to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2023.

  • Iswar Hariharan (Miller Professor 2019-2020) was honored with the inaugural L&S Faculty Jessica Blanche Peixotto Award "in recognition for his outstanding contributions to teaching."

  • Jennifer Doudna (Miller Senior Fellow 2017) received the inaugural Kimberly Prize in Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics for "outstanding research contributions into the molecular basis of life with a direct demonstrated link of their discovery into clinic for the betterment of humankind."

  • Ekta Patel (Miller Fellow 2019-2022) was selected as one of 24 new Fellows for a prestigious NASA Hubble Fellowship Program (NHFP). The NHFP is one of the highlights of NASA's pursuit of excellence in astrophysics.

  • The Biden Administration named Gabor Somorjai (Miller Professor 1977-1978, Miller Senior Fellow 2009-2014) as one of two recipients of the Enrico Fermi Presidential Award, one of the oldest and most prestigious science and technology honors bestowed by the U.S. government. Gabor Somorjai is recognized with the Fermi Award "for key contributions in molecular studies of surfaces through the use of single crystals, the development of techniques for quantitative determinations of surface structure, and establishing the molecular foundations of heterogeneous metal catalysis."

  • The future of particle physics in the U.S. hinges on what Hitoshi Murayama (Miller Professor 2006), a theoretical particle physicist, and 30 other members of the Particle Physics Projects Prioritization Panel (P5) decide later this summer.

  • Susan Marqusee (Miller Professor 2016 - 2017, Miller Senior Fellow 2019-present) was named a 2023 American Society for American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) Fellow. The honorific program recognizes scientists who have made outstanding contributions to the field through their research, teaching, mentoring or other forms of service.

  • Jill Banfield (Miller Professor 2006-2007) was awarded the 2023 van Leeuwenhoek Medal for her contribution to the understanding of microbial communities and interactions between microbes and the environment.

  • Hermona Soreq (Visiting Miller Professor 2009) was awarded the 2022 EMET Prize for her discoveries about the molecular pathways that regulate acetylcholine, one of the most important neurotransmitters in the brain.

  • Bjorn Poonen (Miller Professor 2005) was awarded the 2023 American Mathematical Society Doob Prize for his book "Rational Points on Varieties."

  • Andrew Rosen (Miller Fellow 2021-2024) was quoted in an interview with Matter on his experiences applying for a tenure-track faculty position.

  • David Drubin (Miller Professor 2021-2022, Molecular & Cell Biology), Rebecca Heald (Miller Professor 2009-2010, Molecular & Cell Biology), Saurabh Jha (Miller Fellow 2002-2005, Astronomy), Raghuveer Parthasarathy (Miller Fellow 2002-2005, Chemistry) and Dan Stamper-Kurn (Miller Professor 2009-2010, 2018-2019, Physics) have been elected lifetime fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society.

  • Jerry Mitrovica (Visiting Miller Professor 2004) was honored with the 2023 Arthur L. Day Prize and Lectureship by the National Academy of Sciences "for his lasting contributions to the study of the physics of the Earth and whose lectures will provide solid, timely, and useful additions to the knowledge and literature in the field."

  • Scott Ransom (Visiting Miller Professor 2015) was awarded the title "Hero of NANOGrav" for the month of January for his critical scientific contributions, including taking a leading role in PINT development.

  • Imke de Pater (Miller Professor 1993, 2003-2004) led many Titan observations using high-resolution adaptive optics on the Keck Telescopes. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has turned its infrared cameras on Saturn’s moon Titan, giving astronomers another eye on the largest and one of the most unusual moons in the solar system.

  • Jill Banfield (Miller Professor 2006-2007), Jennifer Doudna (Miller Senior Fellow 2017) & Brian Staskawicz (Miller Professor 2002-2003) are co-authors of the recently published article "Diverse virus-encoded CRISPR-Cas systems include streamlined genome editors" published in Cell.

  • Raul Arturo Ramos Garcia's (Kathryn A. Day Miller Postdoctoral Fellow 2022-2025) latest publication "Equity, Diversity and Inclusion: The hidden toll of community outreach" is out in eLife. He tells a personal story about how he juggled his career as a research scientist and community outreach in support of science.

  • Former Miller members Dan Stamper-Kern, Umesh Vazirani, Joel Moore and Birgitta Whaley are featured in this video about a ‘new era of innovation’ in quantum science, technology research.

  • Jillian Banfield (Miller Professor 2006-2007) and incoming Visiting Miller Professor Simonetta Gribaldo are co-authors of the paper "Ancient origin and constrained evolution of the division and cell wall gene cluster in Bacteria" published in Nature Microbiology.

  • Michael Jordan (Miller Professor 2008, 2017-2018, Miller Senior Fellow 2019-2021) won inaugural World Laureates Association Prize “for fundamental contributions to the foundations of machine learning and its application.”

  • Jillian Banfield (Miller Professor 2006-2007) and Jennifer Doudna (Miller Senior Fellow 2017) are co-authors of the paper “Borgs are giant genetic elements with potential to expand metabolic capacity” published in Nature.

  • Sho Takatori (Miller Fellow 2017-2020) has been selected as a 2022 Packard Fellow.

  • John Hartwig (Visiting Miller Professor 2009) discusses a new process of recycling plastics made from polyethylene that uses catalysts.

  • The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Svante Pääbo (Visiting Miller Professor 2013) "for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution."

  • Omar Yaghi (Visiting Miller Professor 2009) will be the scientific leader of the Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet (BIDMaP). The institute’s work to help limit the planet’s warming and adapt to climate impacts is urgent. It will capitalize on Berkeley’s first-rate faculty and new faculty hires to create a novel field and interdisciplinary solutions that help solve society's most intractable problems.

  • Ting Xu (Miller Professor 2022-2023) led the development of a fully recyclable and biodegradable printed circuit. The advance could divert wearable devices and other flexible electronics from landfill, and mitigate the health and environmental hazards posed by heavy metal waste.

  • Todd Dawson (Miller Professor 2004) was one of several scientists interviewed for the recent article about fog in the Bay Area.

  • Ting Xu's (Miller Professor 2022-2023) work on compostable plastic by embedding enzyme won the Breakthrough of the year in Engineering and Technology by the German Falling Walls Foundation.

  • Karen Winey (Visiting Miller Professor 2014) received the 2023 ACS Award in Polymer Chemistry.

  • Aavishkar Patel (Miller Fellow 2019-2022) received this year’s Hermann Kümmel Early Achievement Award in Many-Body Physics “for outstanding contributions to the theory of transport in non-Fermi liquids.”

  • Yi Cui (Miller Fellow 2003-2005, Somorjai Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2022) is leading the brand new Stanford postdoctoral program in energy, the Stanford Energy Postdoctoral Fellowship.

  • Aaron Joiner (Miller Fellow 2021-2024) was awarded a 2022 Hanna Gray Fellowship! He's among 25 exceptional postdoctoral scientists who represent a promising and more diverse future for biomedical science.

  • John Harte (Miller Professor 2006) was a co-author of two recent publications, "Information Theory: A Foundation for Complexity Science", published in PNAS & “An Equation of State Unifies Diversity, Productivity, Abundance and Biomass”, published in Nature_Communications.Biology.

  • Rebecca Tarvin (Miller Fellow 2018-2019) teaches a class called "Breaking Language Barriers in Evolution and Ecology" to help UC Berkeley address a long-standing issue in science: English, the dominant language of science. A recent paper that Becca co-authored, "Machine translation could make English-only science accessible" evaluates new machine translation tools that can be used by people worldwide to make their scientific articles accessible to non-English speakers appeared online in the journal BioScience.

  • Jennifer Doudna (Miller Senior Fellow 2017) & Daniel Fletcher (Miller Professor 2019-2020) are co-authors of the paper, "Rapid detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in saliva via Cas13", published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

  • Danqing Wang (Miller Fellow 2019-2022), Feng Wang (Miller Fellow 2005-2008, Miller Professor 2021-2022) & Alex Zettl (Miller Professor 1995, 2007) are co-authors of the paper, "Correlated interlayer exciton insulator in heterostructures of monolayer WSe2 and moiré WS2/WSe2" published in Nature Physics.

  • Soonwon Choi (Miller Fellow 2018-2021), Umesh Vazirani (Miller Professor 1999-2000, 2018-2019) & Norman Yao (Miller Fellow 2014-2017) are co-authors of the paper, "Classically verifiable quantum advantage from a computational Bell test," published in Nature Physics.

  • F. Dean Toste (Miller Professor 2014) and James Olzmann (Miller Professor 2020-2021) are a part of a UC Berkeley team that works with their peers at Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research to find new cures for debilitating illnesses.