Elise Miller

Biographical Information
"Elise Miller, MEd, is Director of the Collaborative on Health and the Environment (CHE), an international partnership of researchers, health professionals, and advocates committed to strengthening the scientific and public dialogue on the impact of environmental factors on human health. CHE was founded in 2002 and is a program of Commonweal, a health and environment research and educational institute in Northern California. She has published a number of articles and blogs on environmental health topics, and recently wrote the Forward for The Rise of the U.S. Environmental Health Movement, authored by Kate Davies, MA, DPhil, and published by Rowman & Littlefied in April 2013.

"Ms. Miller also serves on the Board of Directors of The Endocrine Disruptor Exchange (TEDX) and was named to the National Advisory Board of the Children's Environmental Health Network (CEHN), after 12 years of service on the Network’s Board of Directors. In addition, she is a member of the professional advisory boards of four other nonprofits in the environmental health field. From 2007 – 2011, she was a member of the US EPA’s Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee.

"Ms. Miller founded the national Institute for Children’s Environmental Health (ICEH) in 1999 and served as its Executive Director for 10 years. She merged ICEH with Commonweal, the fiscal sponsor of CHE, in 2009. At that time, the Institute became a working group of CHE and renamed the Initiative on Children’s Environmental Health. In addition, Ms. Miller was the founding Executive Director of the Jenifer Altman Foundation, a small private foundation in Northern California, from 1993 to 1998. In 2001, she completed a three-year Fetzer Fellowship for her work with emerging leaders on sustainable development and environmental health issues.

"Ms. Miller has also has worked, studied and traveled extensively in Europe and Asia, and spent two years living in India, first as a journalist stringing for the Economist and the Christian Science Monitor, and later as a student conducting her graduate research regarding teenage girls and their experience of Westernization in traditional Indian culture. She received her Masters in Education from Harvard in 1992 and her Bachelor’s degree in History with high honors from Dartmouth in 1985.

"On a personal note, Ms. Miller lives with her husband and son, adopted from Nepal, on an island north of Seattle. They enjoy maintaining an organic vegetable garden, climbing two 18-foot ropes in their living room (along with other kids and adults in the neighborhood), and reveling in the many wonders of the natural world."

Affiliations

 * Senior advisory committee, Alliance for a Healthy Tomorrow