Miller Institute

The Miller Institute invites faculty from around the world to submit nominations for Miller Fellows. Fellowships are intended for exceptional young scientists newly awarded the doctoral degree and are selected on the basis of their academic achievement and the promise of their scientific research. The institute seeks to discover and encourage individuals of outstanding talent, and to provide them with the opportunity to pursue their research on the Berkeley campus. Each Miller Fellow is sponsored by an academic department on the Berkeley campus and performs his or her research in the facilities provided by the host Berkeley faculty member. == The story of the Miller Institute knot ==

In 1985, Miller Fellow Steven A. Wasserman, his Berkeley faculty host, Nick Cozzarelli, and colleagues published a paper in Science entitled, "Discovery of a predicted DNA knot substantiates a model for site-specific recombination". The paper included an electron micrograph of a single length of double-stranded DNA in a knot with crossing number 6. The DNA was photographed at x40,000 primary magnification. During a talk by Cozzarelli, Nobel Prize winner, Ilya Prigogine was in the audience. He mentioned that in his private art collection he had a 3rd-century A.D. Roman bas relief which showed the identical knot form described in the paper. A photograph of this bas relief became the cover art for the July 12, 1985 issue of Science. That same year, the Miller Institute was publishing its 30 Year Report, for which Executive Director Robert Ornduff used the knot for its cover. The image was not used again until the early 1990s, when it was rediscovered among many potential logo options and was selected to thereafter be used as the Miller Institute's logo. == References ==