Sara Miller is the Administrator of the Buckler Lab within the Institute for Genomic Diversity at Cornell University.  In addition, she is the administrative support for the Rare Alleles Grant.  Her responsibilities run the gamut from scheduling all the various meetings to budget planning to standing in the field measuring the corn.  If you have a general question about this project, she is the place to start!

Why I Love Working with Scientists
I am probably the only purely non-science person working on the Rare Alleles Project and I wouldn’t have it any other way!

I left law school decidedly not wanting to be a practicing lawyer and, after a detour of a few years, ended up in the Chair’s Office of the NYU Child Study Center, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the NYU Langone Medical Center.  While at the Child Study Center, I had the opportunity to work with some of the world’s preeminent child and adolescent psychiatrists and neuroscientists devoted to research and to finding evidenced-based treatments for childhood psychiatric and learning disorders.  I discovered that one need not be a scientist to support the good work of scientists; there are a myriad of roles and jobs working with those striving to understand how the world works and to use that knowledge for the betterment of all.

In 2010 I came to the Buckler Lab and began working on the Panzea project.  When I arrived, everything I knew about genetics was from high school biology and my understanding of plant breeding and agriculture was next to nothing!  Now, I not only have a broad sense of genetics, but I actually know how to plant, pollinate, and harvest corn.  My job largely consists of taking care of all the administrative, non-science details for the Rare Alleles project.  I particularly enjoy working with a set of very smart people who are smart at something completely different than I am!  

Education
J.D., 2001; University of Michigan Law School, Ann Arbor, MI
B.A., 1997 English, Minor: Philosophy; Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA