- Titles:
- Professor of Pediatrics, Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania
- Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy
- Director of Research, Division of Adolescent Medicine, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
- Education:
- Case Western Reserve University, PhD, Clinical Child Psychology
- Brown University, BA, Psychology and Biomedical Ethics
Victoria A. Miller, PhD, is a clinical child psychologist and Professor of Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy. She is also Director of Research for the Division of Adolescent Medicine at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP).
Dr. Miller has expertise in psychosocial aspects of chronic illness, child and family decision making, and pediatric bioethics. Methodologically, she has significant experience with measure development, observational methods, and qualitative design and analysis. Dr. Miller’s overall research goal is to conduct developmentally-focused research that will inform questions related to child and family decision making about health-related issues. One area of her research focuses on independent self-management of chronic illness, with an emphasis on the development of decision making autonomy and competence. This line of research has underscored that the parent-child relationship is an important context in which decision making independence and competence develop. One product of this work is the Decision Making Involvement Scale, to measure how parents and children interact around decisions that need to be made. Dr. Miller’s second area of research focuses on informed consent and assent in pediatric medical settings. Relevant projects have included an instrument development study to measure perceptions of voluntariness in parents making decisions for their seriously ill children, an analysis of informed consent discussions in the context of phase I pediatric cancer trials, and an investigation into the benefits of children’s involvement in decisions about medical research participation. Dr. Miller has had funding from NIH as principal investigator on R01, R21, and K23 awards and is a co-investigator on additional NIH-funded grants. She was the 2014 recipient of the Penn Medicine Marjorie A. Bowman New Investigator Research Award.
Dr. Miller has served as an Associate Editor for AJOB Empirical Bioethics and was a guest editor for a special issue in 2013 titled, “Contributions of Psychological Science to Empirical Bioethics.” She is a current member of the Editorial Boards for AJOB Empirical Bioethics and Journal of Pediatric Psychology. She was founding co-chair of the Bioethics Special Interest Group of the Society of Pediatric Psychology. In her clinical work at CHOP, she sees children with cystic fibrosis and their families for assessment and outpatient therapy.