Joshua Miller, MD
Northwestern University
Feinberg School of Medicine

I came from a divinity college background to graduate in 1961 from the Albert Einstein School of Medicine I completed surgical training in 1968 at the Yale New Haven Medical Center, with fellowship years in transplantation research at the University of Minnesota and at Yale and received board certification in General and Cardiothoracic Surgery. I spent the next year on the surgical faculty in Stanford, California where I performed my first kidney transplant in 1968.    I was then privileged to help create the Army Organ Transplant program with 2 other surgeons in 1969 at Walter Reed.  I returned to Minnesota to run the Transplant Service at the Minneapolis VA Hospital working under a great University of Minnesota surgeon mentor, John S. Najarian. 

In 1978 I moved again, this time to the University of Miami as Chief of Organ Transplantation for the next 25 years. I was elected President of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons in 1998.  In Miami I occupied the Brandon and Kyle Simonsen Chair in Transplant Surgery. This was 1 of 3 chairs endowed in Miami in Transplantation during my tenure, one of which bears my name.  

 I have devoted the last 20 years to studying the immunological basis and the clinical application of bone marrow and hematopoietic stem cells to induce an immunologically tolerant state in organ transplant recipients.  After retiring from Miami in 2007, I was invited by Michael Abecassis, your most talented ASTS president, to move to Chicago and Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine to continue clinical research to induce immunologic tolerance.  I have had the good fortune of holding over 30 years of uninterrupted peer reviewed NIH R01 and VA Merit Review research funding.

Most important of all is my miraculous marriage of almost 52 years to my lovely, capable and unbelievably patient wife, Roberta.   We have 3 children, Jonathan Miller, LLD, a tenured professor of law, Lauren Kimmel, M.D, and Ira Miller, M.D., PhD, an academic hemato-oncopathologist.   We have 8 grandchildren.   Our eldest grandchild, Joseph, will with God’s help, be a class of 2012 graduate of Albert Einsten School of Medicine.   He will be a 3^rd generation Einstein graduate born to my daughter Lauren, an Einstein alumna, Class of 1987.  Lauren practices Anesthesia, and her husband Steven, Rheumatology in Hollywood, Florida. Lauren’s greatest unfulfilled desire in life was to cancel one of my cases. 

My lasting memories are of the inspiring, truly dedicated mentors that I was so fortunate to have. My first was Jack Battisto, a medical school faculty immunologist who studied immunologic unresponsiveness with Merrill Chase at the Rockefeller in the 1940s. Chase in turn was influenced by Lloyd Felton, an immunologist in the 1930s studying a similar phenomenon; then came my years at Minnesota under the powerful influence of Robert A Good, and his avant-garde group and my intermittent, but continuing contacts with Tom Starzl and his colleagues since 1965. There were and continue to be so many others in our ASTS, the AST and internationally who have stimulated and inspired me.

I have been blessed to witness this fantastic era, both in my personal life and in Transplantation, both of which grew from roots which remain so precious to me. I wish all of my colleagues and those that follow these great blessings.