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Greg Miller

Louis W. Menk Professor of Psychology | Co-Director of the Foundations of Health Research Center
Greg Miller

IPR Fellow - On leave 2024–25

Research Areas:
Education and Human Development, Health Inequalities, Race, Poverty, and Inequality

PhD, Clinical Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, 1998

Psychologist Greg Miller's research focuses on early-life stressors related to poverty, and how they reverberate across the lifespan to influence disease risks. To study issues like this, his lab brings together theories and methods from across the behavioral and biomedical sciences. His long-term goal is to establish a behaviorally and biologically plausible understanding of how socioeconomic conditions affect children’s health, and leverage this knowledge to improve practices and policies aimed at mitigating health disparities.

Miller has received a number of honors and awards for his research, including the Young Investigator Award from the Society for Behavioral Medicine, Herbert Weiner Early Career Award from the American Psychosomatic Society, and Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions to Health Psychology from the American Psychological Association. In 2016 and 2018, he was named a highly cited researcher by Clarivate Analytics, a designation for authors whose article citation rates were in top 1 percent of their field. His research has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, and Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Miller was President of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research from 2015-16.

Miller completed a clinical internship at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic and a subsequent postdoctoral fellowship in health psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. Before joining Northwestern, he was a faculty member at Washington University in St. Louis from 2000 to 2003 and at the University of British Columbia from 2003 to 2012.

Current Research

Foundations of Health Research Center. Low socioeconomic status (SES) has consistently been linked to poor physical health outcomes for both children and adults—they are two times more likely to be hospitalized, 1.8 times more likely to be in poor health, and 1.5 times more likely to die than their higher- SES peers. These are not just an effect of poverty: Even as SES increases, the prevalence of poor health outcomes persists. A team led by Edith Chen and Greg Miller are investigating the relationship between SES and health effects. To this end, Chen and Miller have established a new research group at Northwestern, the Foundations of Health Research Center, to explore the relationship between social factors and physical health across the life span for children and adults. They study psychosocial and biological pathways, like family relationships and the immune system, that link the social world to disease outcomes in the context of lung and heart disease. Grants from the National Institutes of Health support the research.

Some of the research Miller conducts at the FHRC includes:

Stress and Health During Pregnancy: This is collaborative research with Dr. Ann Borders and Dr. Linda Ernst of NorthShore University Hospital, and Dr. Amy Crockett at Greenville Health System. Research shows that poverty increases the risk for numerous medical problems across the lifespan, and these deleterious influences begin in the earliest stages of the lifecourse. The offspring of low-income families have disproportionately high rates of growth restriction, preterm birth, and neonatal mortality, among other adverse outcomes. The goal of this research is to identify the contextual, psychosocial, and biological pathways that underlie these disparities, and use interventions during pregnancy to ameliorate them. The researchers focus in particular on stressors that low-income families experience, and how they affect inflammatory activity at the maternal-fetal interface.

Childhood Origins of Cardiovascular Risk: In recent decades there has been a marked decline in morbidity and mortality from coronary heart disease (CHD) in the US. But the strength of this trend varies across demographic groups. Those of low SES continue to develop, and die from, CHD at rates more typical of the 1970’s. Most research on the origins of these disparities focuses on middle stages of the lifespan, when CHD manifests clinically. While this research has been fruitful, shifting the focus towards earlier life stages could yield valuable insights. Many pathogenic mechanisms that give rise to CHD begin in childhood, and by adolescence increasing numbers of American youth display risk factors for and preclinical signs of CHD, which themselves pattern by SES.  Despite these findings, relatively little attention has been directed towards early CHD disparities. We know little about why they emerge, how they unfold developmentally, and what could be done to mitigate them. In a series of collaborative studies with IPR fellows Edith Chen and Robin Nusslock, and colleagues elsewhere (Gene Brody -  Georgia; Kathy Grant - DePaul; Daichi Shimbo - Columbia) we are addressing these gaps in knowledge, using both prospective observational studies and intervention trials.

 

Selected Publications

Chen, E., G. Brody, and G. Miller. 2022. What are the health consequences of upward mobility? Annual Review of Psychology 73: 599–628. 

Chiang, J., P. Lam, E. Chen, and G. Miller. 2022. Psychological stress during childhood and adolescence and its association with inflammation across the lifespan: A critical review and meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin 148(1-2): 27–66. 

Freedman, A., A. Papachristos, B. Smart, L. Keenan-Devlin, S. Khan, A. Borders, K. Kershaw, and G. Miller. 2022. Complaints about excessive use of police force in women’s neighborhoods and perinatal and cardiovascular health. Science Advances 8(3): eabl5417. 

Finegood, E., D. Briley, N. Turiano, A. Freedman, S. South, R. Krueger, E. Chen, D. Mroczek, and G. Miller. 2021. Association of wealth and longevity in US adults at midlife. JAMA Health Forum 2(7): e211652.

McDade, T., J. Aronoff, A. Leigh, E. Finegood, R. Weissman-Tsukamoto, G. Brody, and G. Miller. 2021. Out of the lab and into the field: Validation of portable cell culture protocols. Psychosomatic Medicine 83(3): 283–90.

Miller, G., E. Chen, E. Finegood, P. Lam, R. Weissman-Tsukamoto, A. Leigh, L. Hoffer, A. Carroll, G. Brody, T. Parrish, and R. Nusslock. 2021. Resting-state functional connectivity of the central executive network moderates the relationship between neighborhood violence and pro-inflammatory phenotype in children. Biological Psychiatry 90(3): 165–72.  

Miller, G., S. White, E. Chen, and R. Nusslock. 2021. Among children living in poverty, inflammatory activity is associated with larger neural responses to threat and reward. The American Journal of Psychiatry 178(4): 313–20. 

Levine, C., H. Markus, M. Austin, E. Chen, and G. Miller. 2019. Students of color show health advantages when they attend schools that emphasize the value of diversity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116(13): 6013–18. 

Chiang, J., E. Chen, and G. Miller. 2018. Midlife self-reported social support as a buffer against premature mortality risks associated with abuse during childhood. Nature Human Behaviour 2: 261–68. 

Miller, G., E. Chen, C. Armstrong, A. Carroll, S. Ozturk, K. Rydland, G. Brody, T. Parrish, and R. Nusslock. 2018. Functional connectivity in central executive network protects children against cardiometabolic risks linked with neighborhood violence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(47): 12063–8.