By Harold P. Batchelder and William T. Peterson

Professor Charles B. (Charlie) Miller was the 2008 recipient of the Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES) Wooster Award, recognizing contributions to North Pacific science and to PICES.

Prof. Miller has been described by his oceanographic colleagues at various times as thoughtful and insightful, by friends as concerned for the good of humanity, by his students as a capable if demanding mentor, by some as curmudgeonly and intimidating, but by all as Charlie. Charlie grew up far from the ocean in Minnesota, raised by a grammar-correcting English teacher and a physician to whom ‘thinking scientifically’ was a religious tenet. A high point of his life was being drum major of his high school band. He attended Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, graduating in 1963 with an academic record including, among other low points, a D in German. But, he was very good at GRE tests, which got him into graduate school. Charlie’s interest in marine biology and biological oceanography was stimulated by a summer course at University of the Pacific’s marine station at Tomales Bay, taught by Joel Hedgpeth and Jefferson Gonor. Diverted from medical school by this experience, Charlie enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where he studied with John McGowan, who emphasized work at sea. Other influential mentors were William Fager, Abraham Fleminger and Edward Brinton.
 
After receiving his Ph.D. (1969), Charlie spent a year in New Zealand as a National Science Foundation fellow, working with R. Morrison Cassie. In 1970, Charlie started work as an Assistant Professor at Oregon State University (OSU), landing in an office that he continues to occupy daily as an emeritus professor of oceanography. He has maintained his interests in the ecology of zooplankton, particularly processes in Oregon’s coastal ocean and the oceanic subarctic Pacific. Early work at OSU was research on the composition of mesozooplankton in the Oregon coastal upwelling region, collaborating with Bill Pearcy and Jeff Gonor. Key papers were written with Bill Peterson, now with NOAA at Newport and carrying on a tradition of time-series sampling.

To understand the ecology of marine zooplankton, Charlie believes there is no substitute for knowing your organism, which means observing the morphology, behavior, distribution and life cycle timing of species.  Most of his publications address those themes. Charlie and Bruce Frost of the University of Washington realized in the late 1970s that the Canadian Ocean Weathership program in the central Gulf of Alaska (Station PAPA) would soon end.  So, they organized to collect weekly samples to 2000 m during the last 18 months of operations. The series allowed detailed analysis of mid-ocean life history patterns for a suite of dominant zooplankton species, work that has held up remarkably well when re-examined by Japanese workers. 
 
The weathership work sowed the seeds for the Subarctic Pacific Ecosystem Research (SUPER) program led by Charlie and Bruce Frost, an interdisciplinary effort to understand the spring-summer dynamics of the planktonic ecosystem. Many of the key aspects of dynamics in what are now called High Nitrate, Low Chlorophyll (HNLC) regions were suggested or documented by SUPER:

• iron limitation
• microzooplankton grazing capacity
• early-season macro-grazing capacity provided by the unique life cycles of Neocalanus
• the effects of the region’s unique stratification
• seasonal cycling

The program was a model of hypothesis-driven research in mid-ocean ecology. The research resulted in the SUPER synthesis (Miller et al., 1991), which was successfully modeled by Bruce Frost (1993) and later was called the “ecumenical iron hypothesis” by John Cullen. Along the way, Charlie discovered and described Neocalanus flemingeri and wrote all of the early papers about the unusual life history of this important North Pacific copepod. Until he saw it alive, he and others had not distinguished it from the sympatric Neocalanus plumchrus. SUPER provided a research apprenticeship for Hal Batchelder, who programmed (at Charlie’s suggestion) the first individual-based model of a zooplankton (Matridia pacifica) life history.  Charlie is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, recognition granted for the SUPER results.
 
Charlie has not restricted his research interests solely to North Pacific zooplankton. He has had a long-standing interest in understanding the life cycle stages and population dynamics of Calanus finmarchicus, the dominant large copepod of subarctic North Atlantic ecosystems. Initial work on its resting stages during a sabbatical at the University of Maine led to participation with Peter Wiebe and others in the U.S. GLOBEC Northwest Atlantic/Georges Bank program in the 1990s. This connection allowed him to lead, with Kurt Tande of Norway, the Trans-Atlantic Studies of Calanus finmarchicus (TASC) program of ICES. This was a multinational effort, involving the US, Canada, and many countries of the European Union, to complete an intensive, cross-regional comparison of a single species from many sites in the North Atlantic—all in one year—The Year of Calanus in 1997. Of course, that turned out to be a realization of “Miller’s Law”: Big programs always operate in ecologically unusual years.

Over the decades Charlie has served on the UNOLS Advisory Council, on NSF review panels, the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee, ICES and PICES working groups, and more less noted committees than he chooses to remember.  In the early 2000s he edited Progress in Oceanography for four years. He is still co-chairman with Tsutomu Ikeda of Japan of the PICES project called Ocean Ecodynamics Comparison in the Subarctic Pacific (OECOS). The goal of this multinational (US, Japan, Canada) program is a detailed and parallel comparison of plankton processes and dynamics of the western subarctic and eastern subarctic gyres during spring. The Japanese component was funded and conducted their investigations during spring. Charlie co-convened (with Atsushi Yamaguchi) a workshop on these Oyashio results of OECOS work at PICES 17, and is editing a compendium of papers about that work. 

Charlie Miller advised (as major professor) the following students:

Masters Degrees:
John Kenneth Johnson, 1974
Christopher Marlowe, 1974
Enrique Carillo-Barrios-Gomez, 1974
Craig Wiese, 1975
Ann Hutchinson Myers, 1975
Archie Vander Hart, 1976
John Reed, 1978
Christine Miller-Way, 1984
Thomas Heitstuman, 1994
Diego Figueroa, 2004
 
Doctor of Philosophy:
Peter C. Rothlisberg (with J. Gonor), 1975
Barbara Sullivan, 1977
William T. Peterson, 1980
John Kenneth Johnson, 1981
Harold Batchelder, 1986
Jamie Gomez-Gutierrez, 2004
Diego Figueroa, (with H. Batchelder), expected 2009

He hopes that’s not too many.

Charlie served on the committees of many other oceanography students, a role that lessened dramatically after he voted to fail a few. He taught a course in zooplankton ecology (often with Tim Cowles) and taught the biological oceanography core course to COAS graduate students many times. Course evaluations were always bimodal: wonderful and horrible, nothing between. The voters for 'wonderful' eventually won out and granted him the COAS Excellence in Teaching award in 2003. The core course work led to development of a textbook, Biological Oceanography (2004), which is widely used in graduate ‘core’ courses across the U.S. and elsewhere. 
 
Charlie retired from OSU a few years ago, but is in his office nearly every day. Together with Hal Batchelder, Marnie Jo Zirbel and aided by Bruce Frost, he completed a project estimating the mortality rates of Calanus pacificus eggs (before hatching) in Dabob Bay, WA. He promises us to publish the results very soon. He remains an active leader in the field of zooplankton ecology after contributing to understanding of several pelagic ecosystems (Oregon coastal upwelling, oceanic subarctic Pacific, Georges Bank) and the life stories of planktonic animals. Charlie is still intellectually challenging to those around him and full of creative energy. We hope he can keep it going for years to come.

We congratulate Professor Charles Miller as the recipient of the PICES Wooster Award for 2008.