Joseph Miller, Ph.D. 2018

Joseph Miller received his Ph.D. in 2018 from the committee of Cynthia Reinhart-King, Amit Lal and Susan Pannullo. His dissertation was two parts: one part concerned the thermodynamics of cancer cell invasion in the Reinhart-King Lab and a second part on accelerator activated pulse-plasma generation, a novel approach for achieving nuclear fusion in the Lal Lab.

Miller was recruited by the world's largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, in 2015 and accepted a position in investment research in 2016 while simultaneously completing his dissertation. The first year at Bridgewater Associates he worked on developing algorithms to quantify and understand macroeconomic mechanics in the equities market. 

Shortly thereafter, he was given a unique opportunity to be the lead knowledge engineer on a new initiative under the direct guidance of Bridgewater founder, Ray Dalio. For the next three years, Miller would grow and manage a team of engineers and data scientists to work with Dalio, former co-CEO Eileen Murray, and other top senior management at the firm on building people analytics and artificial intelligence systems in an effort to systemize management decision making. 

After successfully defending his doctoral work in 2018, Miller formed OpenMind Intelligence, a start-up focused on causal inference and novel approaches to artificial general intelligence. In 2019, Miller joined as a co-founder and chief data scientist of an enterprise software company, Vivun, to bring his machine learning and AI expertise to bear on the challenges technology companies face bringing their products to market. That fall, Vivun successfully raised venture capital funding and, after a year of rapid growth, is accelerating its next round of funding. In 2020, Miller left Bridgewater Associates and is focusing on his entrepreneurial endeavors.