Charles B. Miller PhD - Professor Emeritus, Oceanography

    CEOAS, Oregon State University, a brief "auto bio"

Known to most as Charlie, I was born in 1940. My initial schooling was in Minneapolis, including both grammar and medical lessons at the family dinner table. I liked scientific understanding, which goes pretty far, and I was good at acquiring it. At Carleton College in Minnesota, my major was “chem-zoo”, its pre-med curriculum. I added studies on invertebrates, including a summer at Pacific Marine Station north of San Francisco. That, at age 20, was the first time I saw the ocean, rendered agog at the power of surf waves, the raw extent of seawater to the horizon, and, of course, Japan. My field project, on Phoronida living in an intertidal flat in Tomales Bay, taught me how extreme and varied are the forms and adaptations of invertebrates.

         Rather than fill out medical school applications, I decided to pursue marine biology with a focus on invertebrates. I was accepted at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography near San Diego. I wanted to spend time at sea on ships, and it had them. I married after college graduation, and my wife and I headed to SIO at La Jolla. The only professor working on invertebrates, and doing it from ships, was John McGowan, himself an SIO PhD grad. He was interested in the ecology of planktonic invertebrates, studying them from cruises out into the Pacific. John accepted my proposal to work with him. In my doctoral studies I worked on the species-level composition of zooplankton assemblages, graduating in 1969. By that date, my wife and I had two sons, Eric and Matthew. We moved with them for almost a year to a post-doc position in New Zealand. Then, I was hired as an assistant professor at Oregon State University (OSU), starting in July 1970.

At OSU, I both taught courses (zooplankton systematics and ecology; biological oceanography) and conducted research on estuarine, neritic and oceanic zooplankton. Much of my focus was on life histories: what the dominant species, usually copepods for me, are busy doing during different phases of seasonal cycles. I advised an intentionally small number of graduate students. After a divorce, I eventually remarried. My wife and I have a daughter, Carrie.

My widely used graduate textbook (Biological Oceanography, 1^st edition, 2002, and 2^nd edition with Patricia Wheeler, 2012) is based on notes distributed in my “BO” course. In early years after 2000, I offered editorial services for scientific papers as “Arielellus Reviews, LLC,” mostly helping people forced (yes, they are) to publish their science in English, to them a second or third language. Entering the Arietellus.com URL of that business now directs you to OarFeet.com. In 2017 I closed Arietellus and began writing Oar Feet and Opal Teeth, published by Oxford University Press in 2023. My email remains charlie@arietellus.com. Some readers will know that Arietellus is a genus of predatory, deep-sea copepods with remarkable prey-capture weapons.