Staff: Jessica Miller

Jessica Miller, the director and pre-award administrator in the College of Nursing-College of Allied Health Sciences Research Administration Hub, took a temporary position at East Carolina University without a clear idea where the opportunity might lead. Now 15 years in, she’s a leading member of the university’s research infrastructure.

Miller was raised in Kinston by a nurse mother who instilled in her daughter the traits that have led her to success — doing quality work and being the best person she could be, while extending compassion to everyone. They lived outside of town, but Miller went to Kinston High School because it had the academically rigorous programs she needed to reach her potential.

She reveled in the challenges she was presented in the classroom and could have taken college classes, but she was conscious about making space to have a normal high school experience.

“I was in a lot of academic programs but also cheerleading and I got my first job at Piggly Wiggly,” Miller said.

She shadowed professionals through her high school’s career path courses in accounting and art, and enrolled in nursing assistant courses with an eye toward following her mother into the nursing profession.

“Traditionally, to be a nurse, you have to climb the ladder and start by doing sponge baths and such, and I thought ‘I’m going to explore other options,’” Miller joked.

Kinston native Jessica Miller supports ECU’s health sciences research programs by helping faculty members and students wade through the research grant funding process.

Before graduating, she was told she would receive an award, which she thought would be for her artwork, but instead received recognition for her aptitude with business and accounting. That honor struck a chord within her, but she still believed nursing school would be her path forward, so she applied — and was accepted to — Elizabeth City State University.

“I went to sign up for classes and they said, ‘Oh, we don’t have a nursing program. You’ll have to major as biology and then transfer somewhere else.’ I just recently won this business award, so I thought ‘let me try accounting,’” Miller said. “I thought I had my career path chosen, but things kind of aligned for me to be here today.”

Elizabeth City was the perfect environment for her to spread her wings: far enough from home to be out of her comfort zone, but a small enough campus and community that she wasn’t overwhelmed. She graduated in 2010 with a degree in accounting and no student loans, which opened a world of options for her, but she was purposeful about taking small steps to find the right place to land.

After some temporary work in Goldsboro, she was offered a short-term data entry position in ECU’s College of Education, which became permanent after the person she was hired to fill in for never returned.

“I wasn’t looking to find my career per say; I was looking for a place that I could call home,” Miller said.

One thing led to another, and her supervisor suggested she shadow the department’s accountant, with an eye toward eventually stepping in to the position when the incumbent retired. While in that role she oversaw the department’s state funding and grants and first encountered the frustration that faculty members sometime experience when managing the funding that comes from research grants.

“We had one faculty member with a multi-year award who was frustrated to the point where she said, ‘I’m never applying for another grant,’ because every year she went over budget,” Miller said. “I took the time to review her records, work with her to fix errors, and my supervisor picked up on that.”

After gaining experience in the College of Education, she joined the College of Nursing as an accounting technician in 2014. Her background in grants and accounting caught the attention of Dr. Heather Wright, a professor and associate dean for research, who in 2017 was forming a new office to pool resources to benefit researchers in the College of Nursing and the College of Allied Health Sciences. The research hub needed someone with accounting and interpersonal skills to interpret finances for academics who were focused on science rather than spreadsheets.

Miller said her team now helps researchers in the two colleges land about 50 research awards a year, about twice the number when the office first got going.

Miller said she attributes the funding successes her faculty have experienced to early intervention by her and her teammates. When new faculty arrive, they learn the funding process and are introduced to Miller, who shepherds them through creating proposals and checking them before submission.

“That’s our contribution — making sure that we support our faculty, whether they’re new or returning, and providing them the services that they need to be successful in their research,” Miller said.

The current research funding environment can be unnerving for faculty members, especially those with limited experience navigating the byzantine rules and accounting requirements that accompany academic funding. Miller said it is her responsibility to not only know the rules but also be more generally aware of the world.

“Since high school, I’ve been instructed to watch the news, read the newspaper, those type of things. What’s happening in the world will have an impact on grants,” Miller said. “Sometimes the researcher will receive an email saying, ‘We need you to justify these details.’ Rather than immediately responding to that email we reassure them that the award isn’t necessarily going to be stripped away. It’s just keeping everyone calm so that work can still be productive.”

While she isn’t in the lab or collecting statistics at the bedside, Miller said her role is very much a part of the research work being done at ECU. And she is working with her peers to expand awareness of the opportunities in the field of research support.

While she couldn’t have predicted the path she would take to get to ECU, Miller said she ended up exactly where she needed to be.

“I love ECU and the opportunities I’ve had, being able to grow and express myself,” she said. “I was very fortunate that I put in that temp application back in 2010.”