Roberta L. Millstein is Professor Emerit of Philosophy at the University of California, Davis,[1][2][3] with affiliations in the Science and Technology Studies Program[4] and the John Muir Institute for the Environment.

and Ph.D. in Philosophy (with a minor in the History of Science and Technology) from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 1997.

[9] Millstein taught in the Philosophy Department at California State University, East Bay from 1997 to 006, serving as Interim Chair in 2005–2006, and she was a Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh in 2005.

[9] She has co-authored with Michael R. Dietrich and Robert A. Skipper, Jr.[9] In 2020, Millstein retired from teaching, but is still active in research [10] Millstein is best known for her claim that within evolutionary theory, natural selection can be distinguished from random genetic drift if both are properly understood as causal processes rather than outcomes.

[11][12][13][14] She is also known for the claim that natural selection is a population-level causal process [11][15][16] but (in a paper co-authored with Robert A. Skipper, Jr.) that current philosophical accounts of mechanisms do not capture it well.