Ryan S. Miller

Ecologist

Ryan Miller is a ecologist with United States Department of Agriculture Centers for Epidemiology and Animal Health in Fort Collins, Colorado. Ryan specializes in landscape ecology, with special interests in disease ecology and conservation biology. Specific diseases of interest include bovine tuberculosis in wild mammal species, avian influenzas in wild avian species, and brucellosis in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

He received a Bachelor of Science in Forest Management from Colorado State University emphasizing spatial analysis (1997). Working as a collaborating scientist with the United States Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Center he completed a Master of Science with emphasis in ecology (2001). His graduate studies focused on landscape scale forest dynamics and related population dynamics in northern goshawks on the north rim of the Grand Canyon. Following his graduate work he spent 5 years as a collaborating scientist with the National Cancer Institute where he participated in the development of landscape scale indices estimating pesticide exposure in human epidemiologic investigations of cancer. In addition, acting as guest faculty he lectured and instructed for several graduate and undergraduate courses at Colorado State University.

More recently Ryan has served on the USDA National Avian Influenza Surveillance Design Committee which developed sampling and surveillance strategies for first detection of highly pathogenic avian influenza in the United States. He also currently serves on the USDA National Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Risk Analysis Committee which is developing models of wild bird movements and avian influenzas. Ryan is currently a collaborating scientist with the APHIS National Wildlife Research Center program in Ecology of Emerging Viral and Bacterial Diseases in Wildlife and the program in Controlling Wildlife Vectors of Bovine Tuberculosis. Ryan has published in Environmental Health Perspectives, Preventive Veterinary Medicine, Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, Epidemiology, and Emerging Infectious Disease.