Jacqueline Miller

Jacqueline S. Miller has decades of experience designing innovative, rigorous science curricula that align with national standards, engage and motivate students to learn science, and prepare them for college and careers. In the over 20 years that she has worked at EDC she has led the development of a wide array of highly acclaimed online and print instructional materials and resources.

Her most recent project involves the development of online instructional materials and resources that use the recent Ebola and measles outbreaks as the overarching narrative for educating middle and high school students about emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases; the causative agents, the spread of these diseases, and how epidemics can be prevented and controlled.

Miller led a team in designing the Foundation Science curricula—four introductory courses in physics, chemistry, biology, and earth science that build Grade 9–12 students' science knowledge and literacy skills through challenging inquiry-investigations, reading of primary and secondary resources, writing assignments, and rich discussions. In the Electronic Teacher Guide project, the team developed a prototype digital teacher guide using the genetics unit of Foundation Science. In the Taking Foundation Science to Scale Digitally project, she worked with a publisher to redesign the print version of Foundation Science: Biology and Chemistry for the digital environment. The two curricula are being published under the titles Biology: Concepts and Practices and Chemistry: Concepts and Practices. The earth science curriculum appears under the title EDC Earth Science.

Miller, with colleagues at EDC, CAST, and the University of Michigan, developed the UDL Curriculum Toolkit—the first open-source Web application that supports the creation of interactive, multimedia curricula according to Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles. She served as co-PI on Exploring Bioethics, a National Institutes of Health (NIH)–funded curriculum project to develop instructional materials for teaching bioethics in high school biology classrooms and was PI and lead writer in the development of Insights in Biology, an NSF-funded introductory biology curriculum for high school. She also was the co-PI of the DR–K12 Learning Resource Network, CADRE.

Miller served on the Mathematics and Science Education Advisory Council for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and was a member of the Steering Committee for the NAEP Science Framework in 2009.

In an attempt to engage a broader audience in the wonders of science she posts blogs describing the science behind the influenza virus, microbes that naturally exist in the human body, averting the ravages of aging, and the forgotten women of science and writes on science education for WBUR public radio’s Cognoscenti website. Roy Gould of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Miller discuss the use of story in science learning in a podcast “The Power of Story in STEM Education” posted on the CADRE website.


Before joining EDC, Miller was an instructor in the Department of Biological Chemistry at Harvard Medical School, where she carried out research on the molecular biology of tumor viruses and parasites and taught courses in virology, parasitology, and the molecular basis of disease. As a Senior Scientist at Matritech, Inc., a small biotechnology company, she directed research on human papilloma virus and cervical cancer.

Miller received a PhD in oncology from the University of Wisconsin and attained her MA and BA in biology from Wellesley College.