Daphne Miller

Daphne Miller is a family physician, science writer, Clinical Professor at the University of California San Francisco, and Research Scientist at the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health. As founder of the Health from the Soil Up Initiative, she studies the connections among health, culture, and agriculture, with the goal of building a healthier and more resilient food system from the soil up.

Daphne is a regular health and science contributor to the Washington Post. She has two books about food, agriculture and health: The Jungle Effect, The Science and Wisdom of Traditional Diets (HarperCollins 2008) and Farmacology, Total Health from the Soil Up (HarperCollins 2013).  Farmacology appears in four languages and was the basis for the award-winning documentary In Search of Balance.

Daphne has consulted for and presented to organizations around the globe including the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Indigenous Terra Madre and Slow Food International. A pioneer in the “Healthy Parks, Healthy People” initiative, she helped build linkages between our medical system and our park system. Her 2009 Washington Post article “Take a Hike and Call Me in the Morning” is widely credited with introducing “park prescriptions” into medical practice.

Daphne is a graduate of Brown University and Harvard Medical School and completed her family medicine residency and an NIH-funded primary care research fellowship at UCSF.  She is on the Advisory Board of the Center for Health and Nature at Oakland Children’s Hospital and the Edible Schoolyard Foundation and a past Fellow at the Berkeley Food Institute and the University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine.