Miller was the daughter of an economist at the Federal Land Bank in Minneapolis.

In 1945 she received her doctorate under Carl Baumann as a Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) Scholar.

[1] As a postgraduate, she worked at the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she and her husband (since 1942) James A. Miller studied chemical carcinogenesis.

In 1947, the Millers discovered that an azo dye could cause cancer by binding to proteins in the livers of rats.

After demonstrating in the 1960s that chemical carcinogens could be detected by increased mutation rates, they examined the carcinogenicity of a wide range of substances found in the environment, industrial chemicals, and food.