Bill Miller III
Associate Professor
Department of Chemistry
Truman State University
MG 3128
Phone: 660-785-4622
E-mail: brmiller@truman.edu
Dr. Bill Miller is the research advisor for the Miller Research group at Truman State University.
Bill grew up in southwestern Missouri and attended Truman State for his undergraduate studies starting in 2004. For undergraduate research, Bill worked primarily with Dr. Maria Nagan from 2006-2008 using molecular dynamics and free energy calculations to study the salt concentration of the HIV Rev-RRE complex. He graduated from Truman State in May 2008 with a B.S. in Chemistry and a minor in Biology.
For his graduate studies, he attended the University of Florida in Gainesville starting in 2008 and worked with Dr. Adrian Roitberg. While at UF, Bill specialized in using computational methods (molecular docking, molecular dynamics, free energy calculations, etc) for drug design and discovery projects. His thesis project was an investigation to find potential drugs to competitively target the Trypanosoma cruzi trans-sialidase enzyme as a potential treatment for Chagas’ disease. He also helped in the development of the MMPBSA.py program used in Amber to calculate end-state free energies from molecular dynamics simulations. Bill graduated from UF in August 2013 with his PhD in physical chemistry.
Bill worked at the University of Richmond under the direction of Dr. Carol Parish and Dr. Eugene Wu from 2013-2015 for his post-graduate work. Along with helping mentor undergraduates and teaching general chemistry lab, Bill’s research focus was understanding the conformational changes that occur in Bacillus stearothermophilus DNA polymerase I.
In 2015, Bill started as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Truman State University (alma mater). He teaches primarily General Chemistry and Biochemistry courses within the Chemistry Department. He earned tenure and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2021. Bill now leads a very active research group of ~20 undergraduate students at Truman State. Their research primarily focuses on computational drug design and discovery as potential treatments for many common health disorders, such as HIV, cancer, COVID-19, Alzheimer’s disease, endometriosis, etc. Feel free to explore this site for more information about his research.
Personally, Bill is a husband and father of three kids. He primarily spends his leisure time watching sports and coaching his kids’ sports teams.
