Courtney A. Miller

Miller completed her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Santa Barbara majoring in Biopsychology.^[1] After graduating in 1999, Miller started her PhD in Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of California, Irvine.^[2] Under the mentorship of Dr. John F. Marshall, Miller studied the biological basis of drug addiction in rodent models.^[3][4] Her findings suggested that memories of drug-cue pairings can be pharmacologically or therapeutically ameliorated to potentially reduce relapse in drug abusers.^[3]

Miller completed her PhD in 2005 and then worked as a Research Scientist at Cenomed Pharmaceuticals. In 2006, Miller began a postdoctoral fellowship^[5] at the University of Alabama Birmingham^[2] Miller studied neuroepigenetics and found that DNA methylation along with the process of histone acetylation regulates memory formation and synaptic plasticity.^[6]

In 2009, Miller was appointed an assistant professorship at The Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Florida.^[2] In 2013, Miller was granted tenure and conducts research on neurological diseases with a specific focus on drug addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder.^[1][2]

In 2015, Miller and her lab discovered a potential method to target the actin cytoskeleton as a means to treat relapsing methamphetamine addiction.^[7][8] In 2017, Miller and her group further explored the effects of Blebbistatin, a small molecular non-muscle myosin II inhibitor, on methamphetamine-related memories compared to cocaine and morphine-related memories.^[9] They found that the effects of Blebbistatin on memory disruption are specific to methamphetamine-related memories and they are amygdala-dependent.^[9] For this discovery, Miller was honored with the Presidential Early Career Award and received a five-year research grant.^[5]

In 2019, Miller and her group found a microRNA in the amygdala that is specifically elevated after trauma.^[10] Miller and her group further found that inhibiting this microRNA interfered with expression and extinction of fear memories.^[11] The difference in microRNA mir-598-3p level and the effect of its inhibition was only observed in male but not female mice.^[11]

• Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, awarded by President Obama (2016)^[5]
• Distinguished Speaker Award, UNC Department of Psychology and Neuroscience (2016)^[12]
• TSRI Outstanding Mentor Award (2015)^[13]
• Most influential paper published by Neuron in 2007 (2014)^[12]
• Kauffman Fellow, Venture Capital Program (2008)
• NIDA Young Investigator Award (2005)^[14]

• Miller CA and Marshall JF (2005). Molecular substrates for retrieval and reconsolidation of cocaine-associated contextual memory. Neuron 47, 873–84.^[14]
• Levenson MJ, Roth TL, Lubin FD, Miller CA, Huang IC, Desai P, Malone L, Sweatt JD (2006). Evidence that DNA (Cytosine-5) methyltransferases regulate synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus. Journal of Biological Chemistry 281, 15763–73.
• Miller CA and Sweatt JD (2007). Covalent modification of DNA regulates memory formation. Neuron 53, 857–69.
• Miller CA, Susan Campbell and Sweatt JD (2008). DNA methylation and histone acetylation work in concert to regulate memory formation and synaptic plasticity. Neurobiology Learning and Memory 89, 599–603.
• Kilgore M*, Miller CA*, Fass DM, Hennig KM, Haggerty S, Sweatt JD and Rumbaugh G (2010). Inhibitors of Class I histone deacetylases reverse contextual memory deficits in a mouse model of Alzheimer's Disease. Neuropsychopharmacology 35, 870–80.
• Miller CA, Gavin CF, White JA, Parrish RR, Honasoge A, Yancey CR, Rivera IM, Rubio MD, Rumbaugh G and Sweatt JD (2010) Cortical DNA methylation maintains remote memory. Nature Neuroscience 13: 664–6.