Rate My Professor Ethan Miller

Ethan L. Miller is a Professor Emeritus in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, holding the Veritas Presidential Chair in Storage Systems, Emeritus. He earned a Sc.B. in computer science from Brown University in 1987, an M.S. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1990, and a Ph.D. in computer science from UC Berkeley in 1995, with a dissertation on storage hierarchy management for scientific computing. Miller's academic career began as an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County from 1994 to 2000. He joined UC Santa Cruz in 2000 as an Assistant Professor in Computer Science, becoming Associate Professor in 2002 and full Professor in 2008. He contributed to founding the Storage Systems Research Center in 2001 and served as Founding Director of the NSF I/UCRC Center for Research in Storage Systems from 2012 to 2019, as well as holding the Veritas Presidential Chair in Storage Systems from 2016 until his retirement in July 2023. Miller has also held industry roles, including System Architect at Endeca in 1999, and has been affiliated with Pure Storage since 2009, co-inventing over 190 patents related to storage systems.

Miller's research focuses on file and storage systems, distributed systems, operating systems, and computer security, including file systems for next-generation storage, archival storage systems, scalable file system indexing, and exascale storage. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, elected in 2014 for contributions to file system design, and an ACM Distinguished Scientist since 2013. His work has received multiple Best Paper awards, including MSST 2015, SYSTOR 2015, MASCOTS 2016, USENIX ATC 2020 Best Presentation, and ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing 2025 for “Valet: Efficient Data Placement on Disaggregated NVMe-oF Storage.” Key publications include “Twizzler: a Data-Centric Operating System for Non-Volatile Memory” in ACM Transactions on Storage, “POTSHARDS—A Secure, Recoverable, Long-Term Archival Storage System” in ACM Transactions on Storage (2009), and contributions to the Ceph scalable distributed file system. Miller has served as Program Chair for SOSP 2015, General Chair for MSST 2012, and on program committees for conferences such as FAST, SYSTOR, and USENIX ATC. He has co-authored over 170 papers in storage systems, operating systems, and related fields.