The Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science was established on the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant un ...

, 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 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 ...

, 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 Randy Wayne Schekman (born December 30, 1948) 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 ...

, illustrating the high standard of the Senior Fellows. The 2010 Miller Senior Fellow,

Saul Perlmutter Saul Perlmutter (born September 22, 1959) is a U.S. astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences ...

, was awarded the

Nobel Prize in Physics ) , image = Nobel Prize.png , alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFR•" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NAT•" then " ...

in 2011. He shares the prize with former Miller Fellow

Adam Riess Adam Guy Riess (born December 16, 1969) is an American astrophysicist and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute. He is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmologic ...

(MF 1996–98) and

Brian Schmidt Brian Paul Schmidt (born 24 February 1967) is the Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University (ANU). He was previously a Distinguished Professor, Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and astrophysicist at the University's M ...

was awarded the

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded yearly by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute for outstanding discoveries in physiology or medicine. The Nobel Prize is not a single prize, but five separate prizes that, accordi ...

in 2013.

Miller Research Fellows

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.

The Story of the Miller Institute Knot

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. 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. 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:
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References

External links

*The Miller Institute official website

*About the Miller Institute

*Miller Senior Fellows

*Miller Research Professorships

*Visiting Miller Professorships

*A list of all Miller Institute members former and present

*A list of current Miller Fellows

*The Miller Institute LinkedIn website

{{authority control University of California, Berkeley Research institutes in California Research institutes established in 1955 1955 establishments in California Science and technology in the San Francisco Bay Area