Freda Miller

Dr. Freda Miller is a cell and molecular developmental neurobiologist at The Hospital for Sick Children Research Institute and Professor at the University of Toronto.  She is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute International Research Scholar, Canada Research Chair in Developmental Neurobiology, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  She has authored more than 140 scientific papers, reviews and book chapters and has 15 patents.

Dr. Miller is best known for her studies of neural and dermal stem cells and of neuronal growth, survival and apoptosis.  Major findings from her lab have provided evidence that adult mammalian skin contains an accessible multipotent dermal stem cell that can generate peripheral neural cells, that the p75 and p63 play a critical role in determining the life, death and degeneration of mammalian neurons, and that one way genetic disorders cause cognitive dysfunction is by perturbing embryonic neurogenesis.

Dr. Miller obtained her B.Sc. in Biochemistry at the University of Saskatchewan, her PhD in Medical Sciences from the University of Calgary and completed her postdoctoral training at the Scripps Research Foundation.  She then held faculty positions at the University of Alberta and the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University prior to moving to her current position in 2002.