Virginia L. Miller is a microbiologist known for her work on studying the factors leading to disease caused by bacteria. Miller is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (2003) and a former Pew Charitable Trust Biomedical Scholar (1989).^[1]

Miller has a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1979).^[2] She earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1985 where she worked on the expression of genes associated with Cholera toxin.^[3] Following her Ph.D., she was a postdoc at Stanford University.^[4] She moved to the University of California, Los Angeles in 1988 and earned tenure in 1994.^[5] She moved to Washington University in St. Louis in 1996, and then to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008.^[4] As of 2021, Miller is a professor of genetics, microbiology, and immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.^[2]

Miller is known for her research into bacterial pathogenesis, the factors leading to the onset of disease from specific species of bacteria.^{[6][7][8][9][10]} Her early research examined the synthesis of the cholera toxin by Vibrio cholerae^[11][12] and identified environmental signals that lead V. cholerae to express the proteins needed to make the cholera toxin.^[13] She went on to examine the mechanisms by which another bacteria pathogen - Yersinia pestis - enters cells^[14] and cause disease.^[15] She has also worked on how Salmonella^[16][17] and Klebsiella pneumoniae^[18][19] cause disease.In brief, she mostly worked in the areas of Microbiology (69.74%), Yersinia enterocolitica (51.32%) and Virulence (48.03%).^[20]

In 1989, Miller was named a Pew Scholar.^[1] In 2003, Miller was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.^[21][5]

• Miller, Virginia L.; Taylor, Ronald K.; Mekalanos, John J. (1987-01-30). "Cholera toxin transcriptional activator ToxR is a transmembrane DNA binding protein". Cell. 48 (2): 271–279. doi:10.1016/0092-8674(87)90430-2. ISSN 0092-8674. PMID 3802195. S2CID 28576010.
• Miller, V L; Mekalanos, J J (1988-06-01). "A novel suicide vector and its use in construction of insertion mutations: osmoregulation of outer membrane proteins and virulence determinants in Vibrio cholerae requires toxR". Journal of Bacteriology. 170 (6): 2575–2583. doi:10.1128/jb.170.6.2575-2583.1988. PMC 211174. PMID 2836362.
• Taylor, R. K.; Miller, V. L.; Furlong, D. B.; Mekalanos, J. J. (1987-05-01). "Use of phoA gene fusions to identify a pilus colonization factor coordinately regulated with cholera toxin". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 84 (9): 2833–2837. Bibcode:1987PNAS...84.2833T. doi:10.1073/pnas.84.9.2833. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 304754. PMID 2883655.