William H. Miller
Senior Faculty Scientist

Chemical Physics Program Leader
Professor of Chemistry
University of California, Berkeley
Department of Chemistry
402 Latimer Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720-1460
USA

Location:		211 Gilman Hall
Telephone:		(510) 642-0653
Fax:		(510) 642-6262
Email:		miller@neon.cchem.berkeley.edu
Website:		http://www.cchem.berkeley.edu/millergrp/
Publications:		http://www.cchem.berkeley.edu/millergrp/publications.html

Chemical Physics Program

Biography

William H. Miller was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, in 1941, and grew up in Jackson. He received a B.S. in Chemistry from Georgia Tech (1963) and a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from Harvard (1967). During 1967-69 he was a Junior Fellow in Harvard's Society of Fellows, the first year of which was spent as a NATO postdoctoral fellow at the Physikalisches Institute of Freiburg University (Germany). He joined the chemistry department of the University of California, Berkeley, in 1969 and has been Professor since 1974, serving as Department Chairman from 1989 to 1993 and becoming the Kenneth S. Pitzer Distinguished Professor in 1999.

Professor Miller's research has dealt with essentially all aspects of molecular collision theory and chemical reaction dynamics. The more significant of his contributions include a comprehensive semiclassical scattering theory (the classical S-matrix) of inelastic and reactive scattering processes, the reaction path Hamiltonian for describing polyatomic reactions, the S-matrix Kohn variational method for state-to-state reactive scattering, and a rigorous quantum theory of chemical reaction rates (and its semiclassical limit, the "instanton" model) that generalizes transition state theory. Most recently his efforts have focused on developing the initial value representation (IVR) of semiclassical theory into a practical way of adding quantum effects to classical molecular dynamics simulations of chemical processes.

Professor Miller is a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Sciences (1985), the National Academy of Sciences (1987), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1993). His awards include the Annual Prize of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Sciences (1974), the E. O. Lawrence Memorial Award (1985), the Irving Langmuir Award in Chemical Physics (1990), the American Chemical Society Award in Theoretical Chemistry (1994), the Hirschfelder Prize in Theoretical Chemistry (1996), the Ira Remsen Award (1997), and the Spiers Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry (1998).