Robert C Miller was born and raised in Yonkers, New York, USA. After his first year at Columbia University, he was drafted and served in the Army until 1946. At that time, he returned to Columbia, where he completed his Ph.D. in physics in 1956. He spent 34 years of his career at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, retiring in 1988.

In 1986, Miller and his colleague Joseph Giordmaine received OSA’s R. W. Wood Prize for “the invention and demonstration of the optical parametric oscillator, first elucidated by Lord Rayleigh in 1883.”

Miller passed away in 2016.