Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers Recognizes APL’s Miller as a STAR

Elishiah “Eli” Miller, a software engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, will receive a national STAR Award from the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE).

The annual awards — offered in 18 categories — recognize individuals and corporations for their technical accomplishments, as well as efforts to help Hispanics advance in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) careers. Miller, who won in the Young Investigator Award category, will be recognized at this year’s SHPE Conference, Nov. 5–9, in Detroit.

Miller works in APL’s National Security Analysis Department, where he addresses critical capabilities to support secure communications for senior government leaders. He arrived at APL in 2012 as an intern in the APL Technology Leadership Associate Scholars program, performing, among other tasks, systems integration for an assessment of voice, video and data quality for line-of-sight secure communication networks.

Because of his innovative work during his internship, Miller was offered a position as a software engineer supporting APL’s Secure Communications Assessment Network (SeCAN) lab.

“Within a short time, Eli was leading teams developing essential software tools that are solving secure communications issues for Department of Defense and national-level senior leaders,” said NSAD Head Mark Lewellyn. “His work on applications to gather and report statistics impacting the usage and voice quality of secure mobile devices has allowed his team to enhance the way national leadership will use secure mobile phones.”

Miller also won an internal grant to develop a series of courses in Android development techniques, helping APL engineers learn capabilities critical to an emerging area of interest to APL and the Department of Defense.

Prior to joining APL, Miller worked as a research fellow at the National Institutes of Health, where he built and programmed an x-ray imager to study Compton scattering, a type of scattering that x-rays and gamma rays undergo in matter. He also studied and fabricated coded apertures to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of scattered x-rays, and built supercomputer clusters using the LINUX operating system.

Miller has an M.S. in software engineering from the University of Texas at El Paso and a B.S. in software and Internet applications from St. Mary’s University in Texas. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

“The recipients of this year’s STAR Awards are truly outstanding and have made a significant contribution to Hispanics and STEM in the past year," said SHPE President Barry Cordero in a statement. “I am honored to recognize these key individuals for their continued support and commitment to the Hispanic community, but most importantly, for paving the way for the next generation of STEM leaders.”