Kevin H. Miller has been involved in coastal resources management issues in state and local government agencies and at the grassroots level in Virginia and North Carolina for the past 30 years. Since 1989, Miller has worked for the NC Dept. of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR). Until 2000, he worked in DENR’s Washington Regional Office in both the water quality regulatory program (as a compliance inspector and field investigator) and the air quality regulatory program (in permitting and compliance at major chemical industries and in overseeing the regional ambient monitoring program). Since 2000 he has worked for DENR’s Wetlands Restoration Program (WRP) and its successor agency, the Ecosystem Enhancement Program (EEP), initially on an EPA grant to improve restoration of coastal plain riparian ecosystems. When WRP became EEP in 2003, he took over the agency's research and grants program.
Miller’s research area is large scale, whole-ecosystem approaches to restoration of aquatic resources. His research is integrated with his EEP professional work to provide a connection between the university and the agency for transferring academic research results to develop practical applications to evaluate restoration projects. His dissertation (with advisor Dr. Mark Brinson) investigates theoretical and empirical relationships among riparian ecosystem condition assessments at different scales, including typical restoration project scale (100-1,000 m stream length) and small watershed scale (10-100 km2 area).
Miller currently serves as president of the ECU student chapter of The Coastal Society (TCS-ECU). He is also actively involved in grassroots environmentalism and teaching. He has served on several technical advisory committees including those for the Citizens’ Water Quality Monitoring Project (1989-1994), Pamlico Community College’s environmental science technology program (1993-1996) and the Pamlico-Tar River Foundation (1990-present). He has taught and spoken about water and air quality protection and regulation, and wetland and stream restoration to high schools, colleges, advisory groups and civic organizations. Since 1992, he has helped coach the Washington High School Science Olympiad team. In 1994, Miller received PTRF’s Great Blue Heron Award for volunteer work on a novel trading program for reducing non-point source nutrient pollution. In 1998, he helped PTRF and the City of Washington develop an innovative stormwater management system, for which the City received a $4.1 million Clean Water Management Trust Fund grant. Miller received a Governor's Award for Outstanding Volunteer Service and PTRF’s Dick Leach Award (Volunteer of the Year) in 1999 for that work.
Miller's MS degree (ECU, 1998) involved interdisciplinary study in two areas: data interpretation, analysis, and presentation (analytical chemistry and chemometrics); and aquatic ecology (estuarine and wetlands ecology). His thesis research (with advisor Dr. Paul Gemperline) combined these areas, applying spectroscopic measurement techniques and chemometric methods to characterize aquatic particles (“Applications of Chemometrics to Visible and Near-Infrared Reflectance Spectroscopy of Aquatic Particles”). His undergraduate background is in chemistry (BS, Univ. of Delaware, 1980).
Kevin and his wife, Roberta, live in Washington, NC with their two teenage children, Hannah and John.
