College of Medicine employees of the month are nominated by college leaders.
- Name: Crystal Miller
- Title: Administrator, UNMC Department of Genetics, Cell Biology and Anatomy
- Hometown: O’Neill, Nebraska, was my address — but I went to high school in Verdigre, so I claim that also.
Talk about your job and what you like best about it:
As the departmental administrator, I do a lot of different things and often it is whatever is needed at the time. It takes a team to support a department as diverse as genetics, cell biology and anatomy. I am surrounded by three outstanding administrative staff, and together we support all of the departmental activities. Our department has three major roles, professional education, research and graduate education. For professional education, we support 10 faculty members and an instructional designer in the education of medical students in all of the Phase 1 blocks in the TPT (Training the Physicians of Tomorrow) curriculum, as well as some Phase 3 students in research rotations, allied health students, including physician assistant, physical therapy, genetic counseling, occupational therapy students and masters in medical anatomy students. For our research mission, we support 15 faculty in managing personnel, budgets, grants submissions and management, as well as lab management. For the graduate education mission, we host two of the IGPBS (Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Biomedical Sciences) programs – molecular genetics and cell biology, and bioinformatics and systems biology — so we provide course support and administrative support for both of those programs.
I really love what I do, as there are challenges every day to meet the needs of a lot of different people in a wide variety of ways. This gives me an opportunity to really stretch my knowledge and learn new things and new ways to do things. Supporting my staff in all the hard work they do gives me great satisfaction as well. We really do work as a team and support one another in the good and in the challenges.
List three things people may not know about you:
- I don’t have any children, but I’ve gotten to be a birth coach three times.
- I grew up on a diversified livestock farm. We had milking cows, beef cattle, sheep, pigs, rabbits, chickens, turkeys, cats and dogs. Spring is my favorite time of year, as that is when all the baby animals arrive.
- I am very active in the Lutheran Women’s Missionary League, which supports mission projects in the amount of $2 million every two years. Money is collected in a little cardboard box called a Mite box. This organization also promotes leadership experiences for women, which helps me not only in my faith life and that organization, but here at UNMC in my work life as well.