Paige Miller has worn many hats: reformatory guard and drug abuse counselor in Rhode Island, lawyer in Philadelphia and Seattle, community activist and non-profit executive, airport and seaport commissioner in Seattle, and now president of an early-stage medical technology company here in New Orleans.

She grew up on Long Island, outside of New York City, and went to college in New England—Smith and Brown for undergraduate school and Yale for law school. 

She practiced law in Seattle, but left legal practice when she was told that it was incompatible with private practice for a woman attorney to have children (it was the early 80s!).

In 1987, she was an elected commissioner of the Port of Seattle, a combined airport and seaport authority.  She served for 18 years, at a time when Seattle boomed as a center of trade with Asia and as a tech center.  She also founded a non-profit, Port Jobs, to help disadvantaged people get the training and skills to find work in the port sector.  It has helped more than 30,000 to get jobs.

After the Port, she became the executive director of the foundation that supports Seattle’s arboretum where she led the effort to get $20 million in mitigation money as compensation for the expansion of a state highway through the arboretum, and raised the money to build several new garden exhibits with plants from the Pacific Rim.

It was then that she reconnected with her first love, Dr. Harry Gould, who is a neurologist on faculty here in New Orleans at LSU Health Sciences Center.  He and his research partner in studying pain found a novel way to destroy advanced cancer cells in a wide number of cancers—including breast, lung, colon, and prostate.  She helped them to found the company of which she is now president: Oleander Medical Technologies. She will talk about this revolutionary treatment, pilot studies in dogs and cats, and one emergency use treating a person--and what this treatment could mean for our medical system and economy here in Louisiana.