Renee Miller

Professor, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Instructional Track; Director, Undergraduate Neuroscience Program University of Rochester

  • Rochester NY

Miller examines sex differences in brains and behaviors. She is author of "Cognitive Bias in Fantasy Sports."

Contact

University of Rochester

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Areas of Expertise

Fantasy Football
Fantasy Sports and decision making
Neuroscience
Cognitive Bias
Neurobiology
Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Social

Biography

Miller's research aims to understand the genetic basis for sex differences in behaviors. She investigates how inherent or adaptive differences in the nervous system contribute to sexual dimorphism and potentially, to the sex biases seen in many neurological disorders.

Miller is an avid fantasy analyst and her book, Cognitive Bias in Fantasy Sports: Is your brain sabotaging your team? helped her recognize the intersection between her two passions--sports and the brain--which shapes her fantasy writing today.

Education

University of Rochester

PhD

2005

Selected Media Appearances

How Long Should an NFL Player Take to Recover From a Mild Concussion?

MSN News  online

2022-10-25

As explained by Renee Miller, the effect of all brain injuries changes depending on several factors unique to each person.

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Fantasy Football 2022: How cognitive bias can aid in you losing your weekly matchups

Yahoo!  online

2022-09-06

A cognitive bias is a mental process that can lead to illogical and irrational decisions. Renee Miller, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, explains how biased thinking can affect your weekly fantasy football matchups

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Cognitive bias in fantasy football: Why reading this draft kit might actually hurt your process

The Athletic  online

2022-06-30

I was obsessed with neuroscience and how the brain works before I was obsessed with fantasy sports, but I was well into both passions before I recognized how they intersected. Decision-making is one of the hottest topics in one of the hottest fields right now, neuroeconomics, but some of the most important principles go back at least a decade to the seminal work of Daniel Kahneman — “Thinking Fast and Slow” — and are equally relatable to fantasy sports decisions.

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Research Focus

Research Overview

In our research we use the model organism C. elegans, a free-living soil based roundworm. Dr. Portman's lab uses several approaches, including a novel technique to sex-reverse the nervous system of our worms, to study the above questions. Former students and post-docs in the lab have investigated sex differences in olfaction and locomotion. Currently, we are working on understanding a sex difference in exploration. Males explore to a much greater extent than do hermaphrodites in this species. We find that the difference in exploration can be traced to a single gene product, expressed in a single pair of sensory neurons in C. elegans hermaphrodites. Forcing the expression of this gene in males, or sex reversing the nervous system can lead to hermaphrodite-like behavior in male worms. We are currently investigating the link between this gene and food sensation as well as what kind of evolutionary advantage this sex difference confers upon C. elegans males.

Additional projects I am pursuing with Dr. Portman include the investigation of a male-specific neuropeptide, FLP-23. Males lacking the flp-23 gene have behavioral deficits that may be traceable to developmental abnormalities in gonad morphogenesis. We are also using the CRISPR/Cas9 system to generate mutations in candidate receptors for FLP-23 in order to better understand the molecular signal transduction required for male specific behaviors and development. All of these projects ultimately help us to understand how sex differences in the brain are generated and regulated, what the physical substrates of the differences are, and how such differences interact with environmental stimuli to produce unique behavioral outputs and differential disease susceptibility.

Selected Articles

Sex, Age, and Hunger Regulate Behavioral Prioritization through Dynamic Modulation of Chemoreceptor Expression

Current Biology

DA Ryan, RM Miller, KH Lee, S Neal, K Fagan, P Sengupta and DS Portman

2014

Adaptive behavioral prioritization requires flexible outputs from fixed neural circuits. In C. elegans, the prioritization of feeding versus mate searching depends on biological sex (males will abandon food to search for mates, whereas hermaphrodites will not) as well as developmental stage and feeding status. Previously, we found that males are less attracted than hermaphrodites to the food-associated odorant diacetyl, suggesting that sensory modulation may contribute to behavioral prioritization.

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Multiple doublesex-Related Genes Specify Critical Cell Fates in a C. elegans Male Neural Circuit

PLoS ONE

Siehr MS, Koo PK, Sherlekar AL, Bian X, Bunkers MR, Miller RM, Portman DS, Lints R.

2011

In most animal species, males and females exhibit differences in behavior and morphology that relate to their respective roles in reproduction. DM (Doublesex/MAB-3) domain transcription factors are phylogenetically conserved regulators of sexual development. They are thought to establish sexual traits by sex-specifically modifying the activity of general developmental programs. However, there are few examples where the details of these interactions are known, particularly in the nervous system.

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The Wnt/β-Catenin Asymmetry Pathway Patterns the Atonal Ortholog lin-32 to Diversify Cell Fate in a Caenorhabditis elegans Sensory Lineage

Journal of Neuroscience

Renee M. Miller and Douglas S. Portman

2011

Each sensory ray of the Caenorhabditis elegans male tail comprises three distinct neuroglial cell types. These three cells descend from a single progenitor, the ray precursor cell, through several rounds of asymmetric division called the ray sublineage. Ray development requires the conserved atonal-family bHLH gene lin-32, which specifies the ray neuroblast and promotes the differentiation of its progeny. However, the mechanisms that allocate specific cell fates among these progeny are unknown. Here we show that the distribution of LIN-32 during the ray sublineage is markedly asymmetric, localizing to anterior daughter cells in two successive cell divisions. The anterior–posterior patterning of LIN-32 expression and of differentiated ray neuroglial fates is brought about by the Wnt/β-catenin asymmetry pathway, including the Wnt ligand LIN-44, its receptor LIN-17, and downstream components LIT-1 (NLK), SYS-1 (β-catenin), and POP-1 (TCF). LIN-32 asymmetry itself has an important role in patterning ray cell fates, because the failure to silence lin-32 expression in posterior cells disrupts development of this branch of the ray sublineage. Together, our results illustrate a mechanism whereby the regulated function of a proneural-class gene in a single neural lineage can both specify a neural precursor and actively pattern the fates of its progeny. Moreover, they reveal a central role for the Wnt/β-catenin asymmetry pathway in patterning neural and glial fates in a simple sensory lineage.

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