Laura L. Miller, IUS Chair and President
Laura L. Miller is a military sociologist at RAND. For more than 30 years she has studied the lives of military personnel and their families through interviews, discussion groups, surveys, observations, and analyses of military policy, program, and personnel data. Her research focuses on the strengths and challenges of military life within organizational and societal contexts, including military culture and organization; deployment experiences; unit cohesion and morale; military and nonmilitary programs to support service members and their families; coordinated strategies for addressing problematic behavior and promoting health and well-being; and factors influencing service member and family resilience, readiness, retention, and satisfaction.
To collect primary data, Miller has traveled to more than 45 stateside military installations and to overseas bases and operations in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Germany, Haiti, Hungary, Kuwait, Macedonia, Qatar, the Serb Republic, Somalia, and South Korea. She served on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s 2019 consensus study on Strengthening the Military Family Readiness System for a Changing American Society. Miller received a Ph.D. in sociology from Northwestern University and a B.A. in European and Soviet Studies from the University of Redlands. Miller is the Chair and President of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society.
