Bruce L. Miller, MD
Dr. Miller holds the A.W. and Mary Margaret Clausen Distinguished Professorship in Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He directs the busy UCSF dementia center where patients in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond receive comprehensive clinical evaluations. His goal is the delivery of model care to all of the patients who enter the clinical and research programs at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center (MAC).
Dr. Miller is a behavioral neurologist focused on dementia with special interests in brain and behavior relationships as well as the genetic and molecular underpinnings of disease. His work in frontotemporal dementia (FTD) emphasizes both the behavioral and emotional deficits that characterize these patients, while simultaneously noting the visual creativity that can emerge in the setting of FTD. He is the principal investigator of the NIH-sponsored Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC) and program project on FTD called Frontotemporal Dementia: Genes, Imaging and Emotions. He oversees a healthy aging program, which includes an artist-in-residence program. He helps lead three philanthropy-funded research consortia, the Tau Consortium, the Bluefield Project to Cure Frontotemporal Dementia and the Parkinson’s Spectrum Disorders Center, focused on developing treatments for tau, progranulin and synuclein disorders, respectively. Additionally, he co-directs the Global Brain Health Institute, which works to reduce the scale and impact of dementia around the world by training and supporting a new generation of leaders to translate research evidence into effective policy and practice. Dr. Miller teaches extensively, runs the Behavioral Neurology Fellowship at UCSF, and oversees visits of more than 50 foreign scholars every year.
Dr. Miller has received many awards, including the Potamkin Award from the American Academy of Neurology, the Raymond Adams Award from the American Neurological Association, the Gene D. Cohen Research Award in Creativity and Aging from the National Center for Creative Aging, the UCSF Academic Senate Lifetime Achievement in Mentoring Award and the Wallace Wilson Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of British Columbia. Dr. Miller is the past President of the International Society for Frontotemporal Dementias (ISFTD), and is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine. He has authored The Human Frontal Lobes, The Behavioral Neurology of Neurology, Frontotemporal Dementia and over 900 other publications regarding dementia. He has been featured in Fortune magazine and the New York Times, as well as on 60 Minutes, PBS NewsHour and other media. For more than three decades, Dr. Miller has been the scientific director for the philanthropic organization The John Douglas French Alzheimer’s Foundation, a private philanthropic organization that funds basic science research in Alzheimer’s disease.