Foil A. Miller Photograph Collection

Foil A. Miller was born in Aurora, Illinois in 1916 and received his B.S. from Hamline University in 1937, followed by a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Johns Hopkins University in 1942. Miller’s 55-year career in molecular spectroscopy effectively began at John Hopkins, where he studied infrared spectroscopy and worked with Richard C. Lord on the development of a Raman spectroscope. Following his graduation from Johns Hopkins, Miller undertook postdoc studies with Bryce L. Crawford at the University of Minnesota and taught physical chemistry at the University of Illinois from 1944 to 1948. Miller re-located to Pittsburgh in 1948 to join the staff of the Mellon Institute as head of the Spectroscopy Division and became active in both the Spectroscopy Society of Pittsburgh and the Society of Analytical Chemists of Pittsburgh. Through these societies, Miller helped organize the first Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy (PITTCON) in 1950 and remained active in PITTCON throughout his career. In the wake of the Mellon Institute’s 1967 merger with the Carnegie Institute of Technology to form Carnegie-Mellon University, Miller joined the University of Pittsburgh as a Professor of Chemistry and later served as the head of the University’s Spectroscopy Laboratory. Over the course of his career, Miller received numerous awards, including the Pittsburgh Spectroscopy Award (1964), the Pittsburgh Award of the American Chemical Society (1965), and the Hasler Award of the Society for Applied Spectroscopy (1973), as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship for study in Zurich (1957) and visiting professorships in Japan (1977) and Brazil (1980). Miller retired from Pitt in 1981 and devoted his retirement to collecting stamps concerning chemistry and physics and serving as a member of the Bolton Society since 2000.