Tom Miller ’79 Engineered a Career as a Health Care Executive
09/01/2024
By Madeline Bodin
When Tom Miller ’79 helped develop the technology for a radiation therapy for retinal melanoma as a research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital soon after graduating from UMass Lowell, he might have found it difficult to keep achieving at that level.
“We were able to cure 90% of the patients, while preserving their eyesight,” Miller says.
Instead, he made the jump to a corporate executive suite, finding an entirely new path to continue achieving and advancing his career.
After a brief stint at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, Miller took a job in marketing and worked his way up the organizational chart at global technology companies. He became the first non-German CEO of a German factory and business unit for Siemens Medical Systems. He turned around the troubled global medical operations of Carl Zeiss as its CEO, and then, as Analogic Corporation’s CEO, he doubled that company’s stock price. He helped to found LightLab Imaging, serving as its CEO. Later, he became responsible for 26,000 employees in more than 130 countries as the division CEO of Siemens Healthcare.
Miller pivoted again in 2013, joining two partners in founding GreyBird Ventures, a Concord, Massachusetts-based investment firm that focuses on diagnostic technologies.
Today, in addition to his role at GreyBird, Miller serves as chairman or director on the boards of 12 medical technology companies. He has spoken at the National Press Club, the National Institutes of Health, the American Hospital Association and at conferences across the globe.
“I think there are very few places in the world that could have offered the experiences I had at UMass Lowell.” -Tom Miller ’79
Thirty years after developing the retinal cancer radiation therapy, he participated in a ceremony celebrating the 30,000 patients who have survived their disease as a result of the treatment.
While Miller has a master’s degree in medical physics from a joint Harvard/ MIT program, he says the influence of his UMass Lowell education, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in nuclear engineering, cannot be underestimated. “It changed everything,” he says.
He grew up in Lowell and has deep family roots here, with generations of his family working in the mills. “You don’t get more Lowell than me,” says Miller, who now lives a half hour’s drive away in Concord.
By age 15, Miller had discovered motocross and the joys of racing a motorcycle on a dirt track, maneuvering through rough terrain, jumping over steep inclines and making hairpin turns. Soon, he was tinkering with motorcycle engines.
When he toured what was then the Lowell Technological Institute as a teenager, he had no career plans.
“What caught my eye was the nuclear science center,” with its nuclear reactor and particle accelerator, he says. “Here, I saw the biggest, fanciest machines ever in my life.” By his sophomore year, he was tinkering with those big, fancy machines as well.
That hands-on experience was key to a future far beyond Lowell, but Miller feels his education at UML also deepened his ties to the city.
“My parents went to school with Jack Kerouac,” he says. “In English class, I read his books. I think there are very few places in the world that could have offered the experiences I had at UMass Lowell.”
Before Miller had even graduated, he began to see the educational and professional opportunities that the wider world had to offer, with visits to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Swiss Institute for Nuclear Research (now the Paul Scherrer Institute) to work with nuclear medicine pioneer Carl F. von Essen.
Despite a career that has taken him around the world, Miller is still that kid from Lowell, and he still races motocross. “I recently cracked my helmet in a nasty crash,” he recalls. While UMass Lowell was the catalyst that changed his life, motocross has been the engine that drives it.
For example, as head of a German factory, line workers warmed to Miller on the racetrack. They told him about problems that other executives had not discovered; he was then able to address and solve those issues.
“The other thing motocross brought me was the ability to manage risk,” Miller says. “I can hit a 30-foot jump, but I don’t just go out and do it. I train for it and practice it. I think about the consequences if things should go wrong and how I can mitigate them.”
He has applied all of these lessons to the businesses he has run and to his investments today. “Aggression without detailed preparation is simply folly,” he says.
As Miller thinks about the students at UMass Lowell who are walking the same paths and studying in the same buildings that he did, he wants them to know: “They can compete in the bigger world. They don’t have to get a local job. The globe is theirs; they just have to go get it.”
Which is exactly what Miller learned in his own years on campus.