ALUMNUS HELPS NATIONAL SECURITY STAFF DECIPHER THE SEVERITY OF JAPAN’S NUCLEAR CRISIS
Life had been relatively quiet in Atlanta for Charles Miller (PhD ’73) until a tsunami followed an earthquake in Japan in March. The immediate threat of a radiation event with potential international consequences put Miller, head of the Radiation Studies Branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), into fast action.
When word spread that a Japanese nuclear power plant failed to shut down safely, Miller, who earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Bionucleonics (absorbed by the School of Health Sciences in 1979), was poised to head to Tokyo to support the U.S. Embassy. Instead, he was assigned to the White House to work with the national security staff of President Barack Obama. He quickly found himself in the role of translating “radiation speak” into understandable language that would provide good advice all the way up through the chain of command to the commander-in-chief.
“First of all, I was fortunate,” Miller says of the assignment, which could have been a real pressure cooker. “I was dealing with some very smart people. While they were not experienced in radiation matters, they were very quick to pick things up.”
In the first nuclear crisis in the “Information Age,” Miller helped advisors separate fact from fiction on matters of radiation and public health. In addition to generalized science translation problems, Miller says the international community uses different units to measure levels of radiation, so there were some conversions to be made as well.
Miller, who spent five weeks in Washington, is concerned about his lack of colleagues in the environmental assessment field. Much to the surprise of the national staffers he was advising, the radiation assessment community is very small. “I’m a mature gentleman and I’m not going to be around forever,” he says. “There’s not a large cadre of people coming along to replace us.”
That’s a particular challenge for the industry and his alma mater, where Miller stepped into the Department of Bionucleonics some 40 years ago and became part of the Boilermaker tradition he had dreamed about as a child growing up in Sulpher Springs, Ind. His path through Purdue was somewhat unexpected, he says, but certainly life changing.
Miller, who has a bachelor’s degree from Ball State and a master’s in meteorology from the University of Michigan, was hoping to pick up a couple of pamphlets on the department, but was instead introduced to professors John Christian and Paul Ziemer, who took him on a tour of the labs, mapped out his coursework and practically accepted him into the program on site.
“I’ve been tickled to death ever since,” says Miller, who previously thought his career would reside in academia.
After Purdue, he spent 10 years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory before joining the CDC in 1992, where he’s been a branch chief since 2002. In 2009, the School of Health Sciences brought Miller’s Purdue experience full circle when he was given the John E. Christian Award, which honors a distinguished alumnus.
