Rate My Professor Liz Miller

Professor Liz Miller is the Chair of Molecular Membrane Biology and Professor (Teaching and Research) in the Division of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology within the School of Life Sciences at the University of Dundee, where she joined in 2023. She serves as Joint Head of the Division. Prior to this, Miller was a Programme Leader and MRC Investigator at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, maintaining a small lab there. She established her independent research laboratory in 2005 at Columbia University's School of Biology in New York City after completing a postdoctoral fellowship from 1999 in Randy Schekman’s laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, supported by a Jane Coffin Childs Fellowship. During her postdoc, she established the mechanistic basis for capture of nascent secretory proteins into ER-derived COPII vesicles. Miller earned her PhD in Melbourne, Australia, investigating the intracellular traffic of plant defence proteins.

Miller's research investigates the basic mechanisms of secretory protein biogenesis, with a focus on protein quality control and selective export from the endoplasmic reticulum using the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a model system, increasingly incorporating human cell systems. Her lab explores the ER export code, where transmembrane receptors bind cargo proteins and interact with the COPII coat to facilitate export, aiming to develop small molecules for selective inhibition of protein secretion relevant to diseases like cystic fibrosis. She has received major funding, including a Wellcome Discovery Award in 2022 and a £2.37 million MRC Programme Grant in 2025 to study how cells regulate protein secretion. Miller serves as an Editor for the Journal of Cell Biology. Her influential publications include 'Selective inhibition of protein secretion by abrogating receptor-coat interactions during ER export' (PNAS, 2022), 'Combinatorial multivalent interactions drive cooperative assembly of the COPII coat' (JCB, 2020), 'Cargo crowding contributes to sorting stringency in COPII vesicles' (JCB, 2020), 'Ultrastructure of COPII vesicle formation in yeast characterized by correlative light and electron microscopy' (Mol Biol Cell, 2022), and 'ER export via SURF4 uses diverse mechanisms of both client and coat engagement' (JCB, 2025). With over 7,700 citations on Google Scholar, her work has significantly advanced understanding in cell biology.