Novelist and Policy researcher

Miller is the author of seven critically acclaimed novels, translated into seventeen languages: Norwegian by Night, The Girl in Green, American by Day, Radio Life, the Audible Original novel Quiet Time, How to Find Your Way in the Dark, and The Curse of Pietro Houdini. His work has won the Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger and has been nominated for or shortlisted for numerous awards, including the CWA Gold Dagger (twice), the Barry Award for Best First Novel, and the Macavity Award for Best First Mystery.

How to Find Your Way in the Dark was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and won the Jewish Fiction Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries. Miller has lived abroad for more than twenty-five years, including extended periods in Israel, the United Kingdom, Hungary, Switzerland, Norway, and Spain.

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Dr. Miller is a scholar–practitioner who builds institutional decision architectures that enable action under real-world constraint and who teaches students and institutions how to design the theories that guide strategy under uncertainty. For over twenty years, he has enabled institutions to devise new courses of action and subject them to disciplined scrutiny before implementation in high-stakes environments where strategy, mandate, local conditions, legitimacy, and ethics must be reconciled.

Miller specializes in building the concepts, frameworks, models, strategies, and conditions that allow organizations to move from aspiration to strategy, knowledge to situated theory, and propositions to practice. Across institutional and international settings, he has treated strategic design as an abductive engine in which proposed actions are generated, tested against evidence and strategic intent, and rejected or refined until a course of action is warranted by an explicit account of why it can reasonably be expected to achieve its intended ends. 

Since the mid-1990s, Miller has worked in many research and advisory roles at NGOs and think tanks, including a decade with the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), where he co-developed the Security Needs Assessment Protocol (SNAP) project to make peacebuilding more effective; where he co-originated Local Strategies Research and Evidence-Based Programme Design (EBD) with Lisa Rudnick; and where he introduced a new model of Cooperative Ethics for field research with Ron Scollon.

He is the founder and director of The Policy Lab, established in 2011. Miller holds a Ph.D. summa cum laude in International Relations (Graduate Institute, Geneva), an M.A. in National Security Studies from the School of Foreign Service (Georgetown), and completed postgraduate study at St. Catherine’s College and Linacre College, both at the University of Oxford.

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derekbmiller@gmail.com