David Miller

David Miller is the W. M. Keck Foundation Professor of Electrical Engineering Emeritus and, by Courtesy, Professor of Applied Physics, both at Stanford University. He received his B. Sc. and Ph. D. degrees in Physics in Scotland, UK from St. Andrews University and Heriot-Watt University, respectively. Before moving to Stanford in 1996, he worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories for 15 years.

His research interests have included physics and applications of quantum nanostructures, including invention of optical modulator devices now widely used in optical fiber communications, and fundamentals and applications of optics and nanophotonics.

He has published over 300 scientific papers, holds over 75 patents, has a Google h-index of over 110, is the author of the textbooks Quantum Mechanics for Scientists and Engineers (Cambridge, 2008) and Modern Physics for Engineers and Scientists (Miller Science, KDP, 2025), and has taught open online quantum mechanics classes to over 80,000 students. He was President of the IEEE LEOS (now Photonics Society) in 1995, and has served on boards for various societies, companies, and university and government bodies. He was awarded the Optica Adolph Lomb Medal, R. W. Wood Prize and Frederic Ives Medal/Jarus W Quinn Prize, the ICO International Prize in Optics, the IEEE Third Millennium Medal, and the 2013 Carnegie Millennium Professorship. He is also a Fellow of AAAS, APS, IEEE, Optica, the Electromagnetics Academy, the Royal Society of London and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, holds two Honorary Doctorates, and is a Member of the US National Academies of Sciences and of Engineering.

He has taught quantum mechanics at Stanford for more than 20 years to a broad range of students ranging from physics and engineering undergraduates to graduate engineers and scientists in many disciplines.