Since its founding at Brandeis in 1976, Chris Miller’s lab has been home to 25 graduate students and 35 postdocs. Many of them, together with friends and colleagues from around the world, came together on July 8 and 9 for a two day symposium celebrating Chris’ 70th birthday.

For four decades Miller has used electrophysiological methods to study single ion channels. Ion channels are proteins that open and close, selectively allowing specific ions to cross cell membranes, for example to drive muscle contraction or nerve cell signaling. The selective transport of ions across membranes is a fundamental feature of cells.

Miller began studying channels selective for potassium ions, and then in 1978 discovered a chloride selective channel, from Torpedo, the first member of the important CLC chloride channels whose malfunction is implicated in a variety of diseases. (Its name comes from the electric ray Torpedo californica from which the channel was first isolated.) Chris discovered the unusual “double barreled” architecture of the CLC family of ion channels. The lab continues to work on related proteins, including Cl^–/H⁺ exchange-transporters.

Miller’s lab has followed clues in recent years to find additional novel channels to study, including bacterial proteins involved in acid resistance and most recently channels that are selective for fluoride. Chris has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 1989 and in 2007 he was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences.

Rod MacKinnon ’78 was Chris’ very first student while he was an undergraduate at Brandeis. After medical school, Rod came back to Chris’ lab as a postdoc, and together they investigated the mechanism of calcium activated potassium ion channels. Later, at Rockefeller University, Rod used high resolution x-ray diffraction to determine the complete molecular structure of the proteins that form the channel. For this he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2003. The structure confirmed a cartoon picture of how the potassium channel works that Chris, with postdoctoral fellows MacKinnon and Jaques Neyton, had developed ten years earlier.

Chris’ wife, Brandeis Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature Robin Feuer Miller, and their three daughters were in attendance. Lulu Miller (who is also co-host of the NPR program Invisibilia) introduced her father for the final talk of the symposium.

The editors thank Dan Oprian for help with this article. The photographs were taken by Heratch Ekmekjian.