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Cherie V Miller, PhD

Cherie Miller is the Deputy Director of the Laboratory and Analytical Services Division in the Water Mission Area. She has been with the U.S. Geological Survey for 27 years. Her main interests are in stream geochemistry, trace-metal cycling and nutrient modeling. 

Cherie has been a hydrologist and water-quality specialist with the USGS since 1993. She worked in the Maryland-Delaware-Washington DC Water Science Center until 2015, when she transitioned to the role of Technical Specialist in the Office of Water Quality in Reston, Virginia. She is currently the Deputy Director of Laboratory and Analytical Services Division in the Water Mission Area and works closely with the National Water Quality Laboratory in Denver, Colorado and project laboratories in Reston Virginia, Menlo Park, California, and Boulder, Colorado.

Cherie's research has focused on continuous and real-time water quality, developing surrogate log-linear regression models to estimate parameters of stream chemistry and to understand stream processes and ecology. Managing and exploring water-quality data has been a special interest and she has developed a national USGS class to enhance our USGS footprint in the realm of water quality; the class is the QW Data Toolbox for NWIS Users.

While at USGS in the early 1990s, Cherie was the project chief of the Chesapeake Bay Fall-line Toxics Program and the Surface-Water Specialist for the Potomac NAWQA pilot. From 1996 to 2010, she was the Water-Quality Specialist for the MD-DE-DC Water Science Center. Her studies have included modeling of nutrient and sediment loads, modeling processes in urban streams, new technology for continuous monitoring of water quality in streams, toxics in streams including metals, pesticides, and organic wastewater chemicals from the human-waste stream, and fish ecology in urban streams. Cherie was an Associate Director for the Center and supervises two science teams - the Water-Quality Monitoring and Modeling Team, and the Fate and Bioremediation Team.

Cherie's background is interdisciplinary with a bachelor’s degree in biology from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, an M.S. in Environmental Science from the University of Virginia, an M.A. in hydrogeology from Johns Hopkins University, and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Maryland in College Park.

In 1992, Cherie graduated from the University of Maryland at College Park and took a temporary position for two years to teach environmental science, hydrology, and geochemistry at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. During this time, she began her career as a scientist at the USGS and has continued at USGS to the present.