Dr. Kathleen Miller is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at D’Youville University. Her teaching interests are nearly as broad as the discipline of sociology itself, including a diverse range of course offerings such as Race & Ethnicity, Social Change, Drugs and Society, Media Literacy, and the Sociology of Human Rights. She is the faculty advisor for the D’Youville Student Sociology Club and was chosen as the Social Science Department’s 2021 Faculty of the Year. She also serves as an Associate Co-Director of D’Youville’s Center for Research on Physical Activity and Sport (CRPASH). Before coming to D’Youville, she was a Senior Research Scientist at the University at Buffalo’s Research Institute on Addictions, where she served as Principal Investigator on multiple NIH-funded grants and pilot studies examining substance use, sexual risk-taking, interpersonal violence, and other health-compromising behaviors in adolescents and young adults. As one of the few widely recognized experts in the area of caffeinated energy drink use, both alone and in conjunction with alcohol use, her work has been instrumental in informing the ongoing debate on the safety of these beverages. She has authored or co-authored more than forty articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals and presented her research findings dozens of times at academic and/or scientific conferences nationwide. Her current research focuses on identifying and overcoming cultural “blind spots” that may undermine the process of solving social problems such as police use of excessive force or the opioid/fentanyl crisis.
