PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Heather Miller

Heather Miller is a computer scientist whose research bridges distributed systems and AI infrastructure, from the Scala language to the DSPy framework. She completed a PhD at EPFL under Martin Odersky in 2015 and co-founded the Scala Center there, serving as its executive director from 2016. As a Carnegie Mellon faculty member, she shared the 2019 ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award for Scala and won the 2023 Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize. In 2023, she coauthored DSPy, a programming model whose compiler optimizes language-model pipelines to maximize a given metric. She is a vice president at Two Sigma, and in May 2026 she co-chaired the first ACM Conference on AI and Agentic Systems with Matei Zaharia.

Timeline

  1. 2011–2015

    Scala and an EPFL doctorate

    She joins the Scala team in 2011 and works on futures and promises, spores, pickling and the Scala standard library. In 2015, she completes a PhD at EPFL with the dissertation "Language Support for Distributed Functional Programming," advised by Martin Odersky.

  2. 2015

    Co-creating Curry On

    In 2015, she and Jan Vitek create the Curry On conference to bring industry and academia into conversation, starting with an edition in Prague.

  3. 2016

    Executive director of the Scala Center

    She co-founds the Scala Center at EPFL, launched in 2016 as an open-source foundation for Scala, and serves as its executive director. While leading the center, she is also an assistant clinical professor at Northeastern University's College of Computer and Information Science in Boston.

  4. June 2019

    A SIGPLAN award for Scala

    In June 2019, as a faculty member in Carnegie Mellon's Institute for Software Research, she is among the Scala team members who receive the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award at the PLDI conference in Phoenix.

  5. 2023

    The Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize

    An assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon's Software and Societal Systems Department, she receives the 2023 Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize for her contributions to the Scala language and its community. Her massive online courses on Scala, Spark and big data, including her own "Big Data Analysis with Scala and Spark," reach over 100,000 students.

  6. September 2023

    The WebAssembly Research Center

    In September 2023, Carnegie Mellon launches the WebAssembly Research Center, which she co-founds with Ben Titzer. A National Science Foundation grant of nearly $300,000 to the two of them makes the center's formation possible.

  7. October 2023

    DSPy for language-model pipelines

    In October 2023, she coauthors DSPy with Omar Khattab, Matei Zaharia, Christopher Potts and others. DSPy is a programming model that abstracts language-model pipelines as text transformation graphs, and its compiler optimizes any DSPy pipeline to maximize a given metric.

  8. May 2026

    Chairing ACM CAIS 2026

    In May 2026, she and Matei Zaharia serve as the first general chairs of the inaugural ACM Conference on AI and Agentic Systems in San Jose, and she is a program co-chair with Avi Sil and Omar Khattab. She is a vice president at Two Sigma and an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon, with research that bridges distributed systems and AI infrastructure.

  1. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI from 1961 to 2025, with a year-by-year chart.
  2. The United States employs an estimated 53% of people in our data with a known employment countryOur estimates of where AI careers are concentrated now and how countries’ shares of dated positions changed over time.
  3. 46% of living people in our data with known birth and employment countries work outside their birth countryOur estimate of cross-border careers in AI, from country of birth and the country of each current organization.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionOur estimates of where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led, from education records in cited biographies.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Heather Miller yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Heather Miller heather.miller.am. Checked 19 October 2026.
  2. Heather Miller - The Mathematics Genealogy Project mathgenealogy.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  3. EPFL sets up a center for the Scala programming language, developped by Professor Martin Odersky. Heather Miller is the Center’s new executive director. February 17, 2016 - Media Library - EPFL mediatheque.epfl.ch. Checked 19 October 2026.
  4. The Scala Center | The Scala Programming Language scala-lang.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  5. USI INF Seminar: Heather Miller, Programming ________ Systems: Distributed | Collaborative | AI/LLM newsletter.usi.ch. Checked 19 October 2026.
  6. Miller Among Those to Receive Top PL Award for Scala Programming Language - Software and Societal Systems Department - Carnegie Mellon University s3d.cmu.edu. Checked 19 October 2026.
  7. ECOOP 2023 - Awards - ECOOP 2023 2023.ecoop.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  8. Miller Receives Dahl-Nygaard Prize for Scala - Software and Societal Systems Department - Carnegie Mellon University s3d.cmu.edu. Checked 19 October 2026.
  9. Carnegie Mellon University Launches WebAssembly Research Center cs.cmu.edu. Checked 19 October 2026.
  10. [2310.03714] DSPy: Compiling Declarative Language Model Calls into Self-Improving Pipelines arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  11. ACM CAIS 2026: What to Watch at the Inaugural Conference on AI & Agentic Systems - Two Sigma twosigma.com. Checked 19 October 2026.
  12. CAIS 2026 Committees — ACM CAIS 2026 caisconf.org. Checked 19 October 2026.