Courtney A Miller

Courtney A. Miller is an American neuroscientist and Professor of the Department of Molecular Medicine at the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Florida. Miller investigates the biological basis of neurological and neuropsychiatric diseases and develops novel therapeutics based on her mechanistic discoveries.

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

Career and research In 2009, Miller was appointed an assistant professorship at The Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Florida. 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. They found that the effects of Blebbistatin on memory disruption are specific to methamphetamine-related memories and they are amygdala-dependent. Miller and her group further found that inhibiting this microRNA interfered with expression and extinction of fear memories. The difference in microRNA mir-598-3p level and the effect of its inhibition was only observed in male but not female mice. TSRI Outstanding Mentor Award (2015) Most influential paper published by Neuron in 2007 (2014)

Select publications Miller CA and Marshall JF (2005). Molecular substrates for retrieval and reconsolidation of cocaine-associated contextual memory. Neuron 47, 873–84. 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.