HEFN

Elise Miller

Organization

Collaborative on Health and the Environment

Job Title

Director

Job Function

Director

Contact Email

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Contact Phone

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Location

Freeland, WA/Bolinas, CA

Biography

Elise Miller, MEd, is Director of the Collaborative on Health and the Environment (CHE), an international partnership of researchers, health professionals and environmental health and justice advocates working to mitigate environmental contributors to chronic disease and disability. As a co-founder of the Collaborative in 2002, Ms. Miller also coordinates CHE’s Learning and Developmental Disabilities Initiative and co-chairs CHE’s Parkinson’s Disease and Environment Working Group. In addition, Ms. Miller serves on the national board of directors of the Children’s Environmental Health Network (CEHN) and The Endocrine Disruptor Exchange (TEDX) as well as on the professional advisory boards of five other nonprofits in the environmental health field nationally and regionally. She also is a member of the US EPA’s Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee (CHPAC). In 1999, Ms. Miller founded the national Institute for Children’s Environmental Health (ICEH) and served as its executive director for 10 years. The primary mission of the Institute, which is going to now become a working group under CHE, is to foster collaborative initiatives among diverse sectors to reduce environmental exposures and other factors that can undermine children’s healthy development. From 1993-1998, Ms. Miller served as the founding Executive Director of the Jenifer Altman Foundation, a private foundation in northern California, which at the time held interests in sustainable development, environmental health, mind-body health, and issues affecting disadvantaged children. In 2001, she completed a three-year Fetzer Fellowship for her work with emerging leaders on sustainable development and environmental health issues. Ms. Miller has also been an editor, teacher, researcher, mental health counselor, journalist and community-based advocate. She has worked, studied and traveled extensively in Europe and Asia, and spent two years living in India first as a journalist, stringing for the Economist and the Christian Science Monitor, and later as a researcher for her graduate work on adolescent psychology at Harvard. She received her Masters degree in Education from Harvard University in 1992 and her Bachelor’s degree in History with high honors from Dartmouth College in 1985. On a personal note, Ms. Miller and her husband recently completed building their home based on ecologically sustainable principles and have a four-year-old son, adopted from Nepal.