Jack J. Miller

Biography

I am a medical physicist with an interest in metabolic imaging, MRI, and the application of quantitative tools to study relevant problems in biology. At present, I am a Novo-Nordisk Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the University of Oxford, and am also a Stipendiary Lecturer in Physics at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford. (If you are interested, you can peek at my full academic CV, which has my home address redacted online). Mostly my departmental websites, in the Department of Physics, or in DPAG, RDM/Cardiovascular Medicine, Wadham, or St Hugh’s are variations upon a theme of this one, but potentially with more up-to-date publications.

My primary research focus is metabolic imaging in living systems through the use of a low-temperature physical technique, Dynamic Nuclear Polarisation (DNP), which was the basis for my doctorate. DNP is a method to side-step the fundamental thermodynamic sensitivity limitation of conventional Magnetic Resonance techniques, and opens new frontiers for visualising the spatial, temporal and (bio-)chemical dynamics of labelled molecules of interest, such as ¹³C-Pyruvate. As metabolic dysregulation is a hallmark of diseases ranging from cancer to heart failure, DNP has the potential to be used as a novel medical iamging technique, as well as additionally providing information that is of utility for mathematically modelling metabolism as a whole. I work with medical doctors, biochemists, engineers, other physicists and occasionally mathematicians towards the common goal of trying to understand and quantify the changes that occur in the metabolic network in pathophysiology.

I am a peer reviewer for several journals in the field of in vivo magnetic resonance, and happily provide advice about anything within my sphere of competence to anyone who asks. Feel free to get in touch, check out my publications (including PDFs), or explore other things. If you’d like something that isn’t on my website, but is in one of my papers, please just drop me an email.

Academic Interests

MRI, NMR and Magnetic Resonance
Dynamic Nuclear Polarisation
Medical Physics
Metabolic Imaging
Mathematical Biology

Education

DPhil [PhD] in Condensed Matter Physics / Life Sciences' Interface Doctoral Training Centre

University of Oxford, 2015.
Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy [postgraduate teaching qualification]

University of Oxford / UK HEA, 2013.
MPhys (Hons) in Physics

University of Oxford, 2011.

Employment

Novo Nordisk Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow

University of Oxford, April 2017 – 2020.
Junior Research Fellow in the Medical Sciences

Wadham College, University of Oxford, Michaelmas 2017 –.
Stipendiary Lecturer in Physics

St. Hugh's College, University of Oxford, September 2015 –.
EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellow

University of Oxford, September 2015 – April 2016.

This work describes our pioneering first-in-man cardiac MRS study, showing that the diabetic heart is metabolically inflexible. Andy and Ollie (first two authors) were the clinical lead; myself, Justin and Angus were physicists on the project and the whole paper was a very multidisciplinary endeavour.

This highly multi-disciplinary work is a tour-de-force showing that myocardial metabolic dysfunction (as quantified by MR) correlates with ex-vivo biochemical assays and human heart biopsy validation

There has been much controversy in the field about the rate of pyruvate transport across the blood-brain-barrier within the lifetime of the hyperpolarised experiment. Through of the use of spectroscopy, imaging and the permeablisation of the blood-brain-barrier both physiologically and pathophysiologically, we show in this work that the role of the BBB cannot be neglected. This fortunately seems to be a function of the anaesthetic used, and provides a further impetus to study humans, rather than animals.

An IBM Spectrum Protect / HFS Backup / TSM client size limiting script

Fri, Nov 30, 2018

In my university we have hte ability to use IBM Spectrum Protect aka HFS Backup aka Tivoli Storage Manager for backing up large amounts of experimental data. Unfortunately, due to local rules this fails if the amount of data to be sent is more than 200 GiB and we have to email the central team and ask them to let us back it up again. The below script (just about) automatically stops the process if it’s going to bust a pre-determined size limit.

NMR Variable Temperature Control, the Bruker BVT3000, and Eurotherm 902/904 series temperature control

Wed, Oct 10, 2018

A common problem in spectroscopy experiments is variable temperature control. One of the giant companies in the field, Bruker, has made a device that blows hot or cold air at samples to regulate their temperature. The device that blows air and runs the show has gone through several iterations over the years, but one variant is called the Bruker BVT3000 variable temperature controller. It has a little microcontroller, and talks to a commercially available (at the time) PID controller called the Eurotherm 902 series.

A simple keep-alive script for OpenVPN

Sun, Aug 20, 2017

su echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward #Enable NAT iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth1 -j MASQUERADE #Set up DNAT iptables -A FORWARD -i eth1 -o tap0 -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED,NEW -j ACCEPT #Enable connections from the private subnet S1 out iptables -A FORWARD -i tap0 -o eth1 -j ACCEPT #Enable connections from the tunnel to the the private subnet, i.e. from S2 to S1 #Bring up the tunnel: ifconfig tap0 up #Configure the tunnel as you like: ifconfig tap0 192.

Vector-Based Table of the Nuclides

Tue, Apr 4, 2017

The NZ Plot The N-Z plot, also known as the Plot of the Nuclides, is a standard plot in which one shows $N$, the number of nucleons in an isotope, against $Z$, its proton number. For low $A=N+Z$, this is approximately a straight line along which stable nuclei exist. As an medical physicist, I perpetually find myself wishing to refer to the NZ plot occasionally, in order to find out if a given nuclide is either (a) NMR visible (that is, $I\neq0$), (b) radioactive with a decent activitiy, or occasionally both.

How to effectively use SSH as a port-forwarding tunnel

Thu, Mar 30, 2017

The problem: You have an expensive piece of bespoke hardware box, $A$, on a private subnet $S_1$. Your computer of interest, $C$, is sat on a different subnet, $S_2$. There is a linux router between the two, $B$, running sshd. You wish $C$ (or a virtual machine thereon) to talk to $A$, but don’t want the rest of $S_1$ to be accessible to all of $S_2$ or vice-versa. In short, you want something on $C$ to use a specific (virtual) network interface to go $C\rightarrow B\rightarrow A$.

Jack J. Miller

Novo-Nordisk Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Physics and also Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics in the University of Oxford

Biography

Academic Interests

Education

Employment

Publications

Recent Posts

Projects

Teaching

Department of Physics

Department of Biochemistry

The University of Oxford Doctoral Training Centres

Contact