Bill Miller, MD, PhD, MPH is Senior Associate Dean of Research, Professor of Epidemiology at the Ohio State University College of Public Health, and international expert in infectious disease epidemiology, and yet he describes himself as "an introverted imposter with ADD." Bill unpacks all of this, as well as being known in his family as "the dumbest smart kid" they ever knew. He also tells me about being comfortable with vulnerability, his 3-legged cat, his college athletic career, and what sports he would like to compete in if he were an Olympian.
Bill Miller, MD, PhD, MPH is Senior Associate Dean of Research, Professor of Epidemiology at the Ohio State University College of Public Health, and international expert in infectious disease epidemiology, and yet he describes himself as "an introverted imposter with ADD." Bill unpacks all of this, as well as being known in his family as "the dumbest smart kid" they ever knew. He also tells me about being comfortable with vulnerability, his 3-legged cat, his college athletic career, and what sports he would like to compete in if he were an Olympian.
Bill Miller: I did change my shirt, I had toothpaste all over before.
Lisa Bodnar: What, are you a sloppy tooth brusher?
Bill Miller: Apparently so.
Lisa Bodnar: Is this is a common problem? Then you're like, "I have to wear an apron to brush my teeth."
Bill Miller: It is. I think it's just because I'm thorough.
Lisa Bodnar: Okay, sure.
Hello friends. Welcome to Shiny Epi People. I'm Lisa Bodnar. Today's episode marks six months since I released my first show with Carrie Keys back in early August. Today is the 28th episode I've put out. This is wild and fun. Thank you for listening. If you enjoy the show and want to support it, go to my Patreon at patreon.com/shinyepipeople. I also post other content on Twitter and Instagram @ShinyEpiPeople. Today I'm speaking with Bill Miller. Bill is an infectious disease epidemiologist, and most of his research focuses on sexually transmitted infections, HIV and substance use. Bill is professor in the division of epidemiology in the college of public health at the Ohio State University. He also serves as the Senior Associate Dean for research. Bill is the Editor in Chief of the journal, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, and is an associate editor for epidemiology. Bill received his MD and his PhD from Johns Hopkins.
His PhD is in neuroscience, which he received several years before he figured out that really he was meant to be an epidemiologist. Bill served on faculty at UNC Chapel Hill for 19 years, that's where I met him, before he joined Ohio State. So with all the success and leadership Bill's had, it might surprise you that he asked me if he could talk today about his imposter syndrome and being an extreme introvert. If you're on Twitter, you know that Bill is funny, smart, and relatable, and what has drawn a lot of people to him is his willingness to be vulnerable and authentic. He shows all of these characteristics today. If you aren't on Twitter, you'll see why he is such a popular and warm presence in our field. I hope you enjoyed this chat.
Hi Bill.
Bill Miller: Hi Lisa.
Lisa Bodnar: Thanks for coming on the show.
Bill Miller: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Lisa Bodnar: Do you remember roughly how we met?
Bill Miller: No.
Lisa Bodnar: You were co-teaching I guess Epi 268 with Charlie Poole.
Bill Miller: Oh yeah. I was. I was complete imposter the whole time during that.
Lisa Bodnar: Really?
Bill Miller: I mean, Charlie's up there teaching and I just finished my MPH a year ago.
Lisa Bodnar: Oh, did you? Okay. Wow. Okay, let's dive into that right now. You described yourself to me an introverted imposter with ADD. A lot of things there to unpack, and that your mom and siblings regularly referred to you as the dumbest smart kid they ever knew. So where do we start Bill?
Bill Miller: Well, that's all true. Maybe we'll start with the ADD part. I was an active child. I played sports all the time, which was definitely good for me. And I was the kind of kid that if I had a chance to dive or slide, I would. My mom used to say that I brought half the infield dirt home with me after baseball games.
Lisa Bodnar: Yeah. Could she even get the mud stains off your uniform? My mom used to be like, "These are just permanent, I can't get them off."
Bill Miller: Yeah. She would just give up. We lived out in the country. We lived on the main road from the city of Binghamton to Pennsylvania and they drove pretty fast on that road even though it was back country road. And one day I was just bored, I guess, and decided to stand by the side of the road and figure out how early I have to throw little pebbles up into the air, arch them to hit the car as it went by. Inquisitive minds. I had no concept that it might be bad for the car.
Lisa Bodnar: Okay.
Bill Miller: And then after a few failures, I succeeded on this big pickup truck. He was not happy. He just jammed on the brakes and backed up and essentially picked me up by my collar and guided me inside and asked my mother like, "How did you let your child do this?" And she's like, "I had no idea he was doing that." Because the dumbest marked thing was I was doing something that was an intelligent endeavor...
Lisa Bodnar: Yes, yes.
Bill Miller: But no thinking of the consequences that might be down the way.
Lisa Bodnar: Right.
Bill Miller: But anyway, so I had no idea I had ADD really until my son was in junior high and we were having him evaluated for ADD. It was just so clear that what my son was struggling with were things that I had struggled with and learned to manage in my own way.
Lisa Bodnar: So how do you manage it at work now?
Bill Miller: Sometimes with a lot of difficulty. The most important things are to recognize that I can hyper-focus, which is a part of ADD, and that usually happens when I'm writing a grant. I can really get into it in that moment and stay there and stay focused.
Lisa Bodnar: In at all in a bad way or...?
Bill Miller: No, that's a good thing. That's one of the benefits of having- [crosstalk].
Lisa Bodnar: Okay. So it's not like if someone's talking to you, you can't-
Bill Miller: Oh, it is a little bit like that.
Lisa Bodnar: It is a little bit like that. Would your wife say that it can be annoying?
Bill Miller: Yeah.
Lisa Bodnar: Okay.
Bill Miller: Well, she's more annoyed by other aspects. She's more annoyed-
Lisa Bodnar: Let's get her on.
Bill Miller: It took us several years for us to realize that when we are in a restaurant, as an example, that I had to sit with my back to the TV. If the TV was in front of me, it's almost impossible to not be looking. Sometimes when we are out I just explicitly have to say, "I'm sorry. I really can't focus." Things that happen related to it at work, and this happens to other people too, I'm sure, but there are meetings when I just have to stand up and move in order to be able to attempt to be able to concentrate because it's sort of like the energy in my brain can be transferred to my body if I start moving.
So there are times when I'm in a meeting, it's an hour long meeting and I'll just have to say, "I have to leave at 45 minutes because I can no longer manage to control that urge to move." When you knew me at UNC, I was in the state where I felt like I had to know everything. If someone talked about some method or something and I would pretend like I knew what they were talking about, and then I would go figure it out without really telling anyone, because I was afraid that people were going to figure out that I didn't know anything.
Lisa Bodnar: Yeah.
Bill Miller: I spent the first five or six years in fear that people were going to discover that I really didn't know anything. And it took me awhile to realize that if I admitted that I didn't know how to do something, no one was going to throw me out. My imposter-ness, I think goes back, probably really begins in college. I went to [inaudible] high school, I think maybe a quarter or a third of my classmates went to college. Going from that to Princeton where I went to college, I was like, "Whoa, there's a lot of smart people here, and do I actually belong here?" And somehow I managed to make it through there and then went to Hopkins for medical school and it was double whoa.
Lisa Bodnar: Right.
Bill Miller: I did fine. I always felt like I didn't quite belong. And then my training was such that I was so non-linear in my pathway to where I got to that every step along the way I felt like I didn't quite belong because I... So my PhD is in neuroscience.
Lisa Bodnar: When did your PhD happen relative to the MD?
Bill Miller: Well, I did it in a weird way because-
Lisa Bodnar: Because you're weird.
Bill Miller: I never do anything normal. Applied to MD-PhD programs, got into one or two and got into Hopkins. So I was like, "I should go to Hopkins." So I went to Hopkins for medicine, but then they started the neuroscience degree while I was there and I was in the first class of the PhD for that. And so on the plus side of doing it that way is when I graduated with my medical school class, so I got paid as a postdoc.
Lisa Bodnar: Oh, nice.
Bill Miller: For the rest of my PhD. The downside was that when I finished my PhD, I literally defended on a Wednesday and started my internship on Thursday.
Lisa Bodnar: Wow.
Bill Miller: That contributed to the imposter as a clinician because I hadn't done anything clinical for three years, four years.
Lisa Bodnar: Yeah.
Bill Miller: I bounced back and forth between things enough that wherever I find myself, I always find myself sort of not really an expert in anything and thinking that I'm supposed to be and feeling like people think I'm supposed to be. The way I end up turning that around to talk to students and encourage people that many people feel like they're imposters.
Lisa Bodnar: Absolutely. When people reach out to me and they say, "I mean, I want some advice or I've read your paper and I think it's great." I almost always say, "Really?"
Bill Miller: Exactly.
Lisa Bodnar: I think I'm still 27 trying to get a K award.
Bill Miller: I still feel very junior even though I have this Dean-ship thing. Who made that mistake? I remember at UNC one time we were in our training program and we were sitting around this conference room and we brought up imposter syndrome. It was probably in the early two thousands and people hadn't really started talking about it that much, and went around, sort of just went around the room and it was remarkable. Every single person felt like they were in that room by mistake.
Lisa Bodnar: Wow.
Bill Miller: This one senior person came in another time and we sort of point blank asked him that question and he was like, "What?"
Lisa Bodnar: He was a white man I assume?
Bill Miller: Yes, exactly.
Lisa Bodnar: Okay.
Bill Miller: And I just sort of was taken aback a little bit. I can't imagine having that level of confidence. It's just never been a part of me.
Lisa Bodnar: So how does the ADD tie in with the imposter syndrome and the introvertedness?
Bill Miller: Being an introvert is probably one of the most defining characteristics of who I am. COVID, work from home is the best thing.
Lisa Bodnar: What was work like before that made it hard for you as an introvert?
Bill Miller: Talking to people.
Lisa Bodnar: Just talking?
Bill Miller: Yeah, being around other people. I don't even have to talk to them, I just... if I'm around them.
Lisa Bodnar: And what does it do to you?
Bill Miller: Exhaust me. And again much like my ADD, I've learned to manage it. I do way better talking to people that are students or postdocs or that sort of thing is much less exhausting than talking to other faculty or in a position of authority. I need to go for a walk immediately afterwards, almost. Yeah.
Lisa Bodnar: And so talking to students is easier?
Bill Miller: I think it's easier in part because it's less about me and more about them. I don't like being the center of attention. If I'm helping someone, then it's not about me. Even in the context of a division meeting. When I was chair and I was running that, it was exhausting just to sit in the room for an hour and try and orchestrate the meeting.
Lisa Bodnar: And I guess layering on imposter syndrome to that makes it doubly, triply hard.
Bill Miller: Exactly. First of all, "What the heck am I here for doing this?" And then, "Oh my goodness, I have to actually do this." The whole COVID thing is terrible obviously, but being able to work from home consistently has been really nice, and I can just not talk to anyone for as long as I can in between meetings.
Lisa Bodnar: That's like murder for me.
Bill Miller: I know.
Lisa Bodnar: As you can guess, I have very little experience with being an introvert.
Bill Miller: I've taken lots of polls of students over the years and most of the at least epidemiologist that I've asked are introverts. A really good contrast is SCR, and Lisa versus Bill, right? Lisa's got to be quite content, very happy to organize the dance party and I imagine that on the nights when there's not a dance party, you would be pretty happy finding some folks to go have a drink with, or have dinner with or whatever.
Lisa Bodnar: Yeah.
Bill Miller: In contrast, Bill's going to either go back to his room and have room service. I go off by myself or if I'm really stretching it, I'll go have dinner with a former student. I joined Twitter for the STD journal. And it was just surprising to me that people cared what I have to say. And so when we got to SCR last year and near them, there were clearly people that were not getting the mentorship kinds of things that they needed. And so I'm like, "Well, that's something I can do. So if you want to talk to me, talk to me." And all of a sudden there was this whole long list of people.
Lisa Bodnar: People, there was a line. When I was sitting with you talking in the lobby, there was always a lingering, loitering student who was like, "I'm next." There was a line of people.
Bill Miller: I guess part of what motivates me is just if that's helpful, then why not? And if I'm exhausted afterwards, then I just... I don't have to talk to anybody else.
Lisa Bodnar: That sort of brings me to this question about Twitter. So a lot of really senior people don't engage on Twitter. They don't have an account or they barely look at it or they just look at it sometimes. And a lot of the times what I hear is like, "I'm way too busy to do that." I know you are just as busy as all of these other people and yet it feels like you are committed to being part of this community.
Bill Miller: I joined Twitter for a very specific reason, which was the SC journal, which is what I'm the editor in chief for. We made a conscious decision to increase our Twitter presence. And then once I got on Twitter, I lurked for six months. Then I discovered Epi Twitter, and recognized that I hadn't really seen the potential for positive social bonding among the group. And then I started seeing questions like, "I'm trying to write a K award and I don't know what to do." And I'm like, "Well, I've read more K awards than any human being should ever have to read. So-"
Lisa Bodnar: I'm proud of that fact.
Bill Miller: "I'm not proud of that fact but I might be able to help you, let me give you some ideas." And then all of a sudden people were like, "That was great. Thank you." And I felt like I had something to contribute and I consciously try to at least go on and see what's there and see if there's something that people have tweeted at me. Look for things where there's something I can contribute. People have always said that I'm quite approachable. Establishing that approachability on Twitter, I mean, I sort of just learned that you kind of come through as yourself and as a result, people ask me stuff. I find it fun. I can be an introvert. I'm not actually talking to anyone, that kind of nice.
Lisa Bodnar: Yeah.
Bill Miller: And still supporting them.
Lisa Bodnar: Being an introvert and being on this podcast, feels like what?
Bill Miller: Well, I know that after this podcast I am going to go ride my peloton and not talk to a soul, including my wife. In the moment I don't feel uncomfortable, but I know that it's taking more energy than it's giving. I'm enjoying this but if I had my choice, most days I would not talk to anyone other than my wife.
Lisa Bodnar: You said that you were nervous before this started and you were very open about being nervous, which I appreciated so much. Especially because when people come on, they think they're the only one that has ever been nervous. I was glad that you said that because again, it's admitting our vulnerabilities is perfectly fine.
Bill Miller: Yeah. I'm not the macho kind of person that doesn't want to talk about weaknesses. I've just learned that there are people that feel the way I feel or something similar and they struggle with it because they think they're the only one or that there's really something wrong with them that they feel this way. The nervousness about this... This is sort of like public speaking, right? It's kind of the same principle.
Lisa Bodnar: Yeah, except it probably will reach more people than giving a talk.
Bill Miller: Yeah.
Lisa Bodnar: No pressure, no pressure.
Bill Miller: Now I'm really nervous, but you know how you're giving a talk, I'm sure you would be nervous beforehand, right?
Lisa Bodnar: I am insanely nervous anytime I give a scientific talk, totally. I mean, my stomach hurts so much.
Bill Miller: I think there's so many PhD students that are like, "I can't go into academia because I get so nervous before I have to talk in front of people." And so I figured if I can say, "Well, I get nervous too," maybe that will help them realize that and normalize our vulnerabilities.
Lisa Bodnar: The other conversation you and I engaged in on Twitter with others was about asking questions at the end of a seminar or some type of talk, especially at a meeting when there are lots of people there. The thrust of the conversation was that a lot of us are very fearful about asking questions after a 10 minute talk, and I was so relieved that people I respected were talking about this and that... We then started to share some science on this, about how certain people need more time to actually form a question, to process a question that, and we actually talked about the feelings that it brought up and what it was like, "I'm going to challenge myself to ask a question." And then I spend three minutes trying to psych myself up to do this, and then my heart is racing.
I'm worried that during the time that I was psyching myself up to answer this, I missed a question that was basically my question. And that then I doubt myself and I'm like, "Maybe this was in the talk already," and I'm going to ask questions that people were like, "Were you not even listening? And a 10 minute talk. Of course that was there." And then when I get up there to talk, my voice is quivering and my face gets bright red. If I were sitting with that person, I would feel perfectly fine asking a question, but in front of all of your peers, how frightening it is, it still scares me.
Bill Miller: I think in my entire career, I've probably walked up after talk and asked certainly less than 10 times, a question. And not that I haven't had questions, but I go through the same thing like, "Is this dumb?" Or even if I'm very confident in what I have to say, my heart is still about three feet out of my chest.
Lisa Bodnar: Yes.
Bill Miller: I remember at SCR the last time I went to the... there was something about misclassification and...
Lisa Bodnar: That was my session. Bill, this is what brought up the conversation at Twitter. Now I'm realizing this. Is that you asked such a good question that you wrote on Twitter. I asked this question and I wanted to throw up.
Bill Miller: Yeah, exactly.
Lisa Bodnar: I'm sorry I cut you off. What were you saying?
Bill Miller: No, that's what I was going to say. First of all, who am I to be asking this group a question? So there was the imposter, and then there was like, "Is it going to actually make sense when it comes out of my mouth?" But somehow I managed to do it.
Lisa Bodnar: You did, and I remember that it was such a good question of the four, five talks. No one brought up this issue, and it was like, "Of course, Bill just had the smartest thing to say." And I remember when you posted on Twitter that it made you really nervous, I was completely shocked. You didn't give me outwardly any signs that you were nervous.
Bill Miller: Well, that's the thing, I've learned to manage that. Outwardly and part of that is managing introversion, part of that is managing imposter syndrome. I can project this sense of calm pretty much at any time.
Lisa Bodnar: That's such a great skill. You're a cat guy.
Bill Miller: I've had a cat pretty much my entire life. I'll tell you about my favorite cat ever.
Lisa Bodnar: Please.
Bill Miller: Well, I'll tell you about my two favorite cats. The first one is named Herman. Herman was... His brother was Hector, Hector died an early death, but Herman stayed on for a long time, and Herman was a gigantic cat, probably weighed 20 pounds. The sort of tragic part of the story is, so my brother and I slept on the second floor of our house and there was a porch roof outside in a vine that went up by the porch roof, and the cat would routinely at night, climb up the vine and then through our window to get inside in the middle of the night. So one night he did this early in the morning and he plopped down in our floor and just started yelling in the awfulness that you've ever seen. And what had happened is his back leg had gotten caught in a rabbit trap and he still managed to come home and climb up, back in but-
Lisa Bodnar: With the rabbit trap on his leg?
Bill Miller: He somehow gnawed his way out. Yeah and the leg was well, we don't have to go into those details.
Lisa Bodnar: It looked bad.
Bill Miller: It looked bad.
Lisa Bodnar: It looked bad.
Bill Miller: And he got his leg the rest of the way in. So he was a three legged cat, but he would chase dogs out of our yard, and he was just this big like, "I don't care I have three legs. You ain't coming in here." And then my other favorite cat was one that we had recently and his name was actually Twitter.
Lisa Bodnar: Really?
Bill Miller: Before Twitter was a thing, we had Twitter.
Lisa Bodnar: Maybe Twitter is named after your cat.
Bill Miller: I think so, and that's why I kind of have to do it.
Lisa Bodnar: Right.
Bill Miller: I have become... I have joined Twitter because I had Twitter first. He was the chillest cat ever, you could do anything to him. He sort of took after me, pretty much.
Lisa Bodnar: Did he have imposter syndrome?
Bill Miller: Probably.
Lisa Bodnar: Okay. Given where you were in high school, how did you decide to go to Princeton?
Bill Miller: Unlike some of your guests, I did apply to more than one college.
Lisa Bodnar: No, there are so many people.
Bill Miller: I've applied to places where I was recruited to play football, actually.
Lisa Bodnar: Wow.
Bill Miller: Yeah. But they were all Ivys and that sort of thing. And it came down to Brown or Princeton. The night before that I had to decide, I had to send in my decision, the Brown football coach called me up, but the entire time he just kept telling me why I shouldn't go to Princeton. "They don't do this. They don't do that." And so what does any 18 year old boy do when an adult tells them not to do something?
Lisa Bodnar: Yeah. You were like, "Dude, you just helped me make my decision."
Bill Miller: Exactly. I mean I was so clueless, I didn't know what it meant, what an Ivy league school meant. None of that had any valence for me, but some grownup telling me I shouldn't do it, like, "Okay."
Lisa Bodnar: What do you do outside of work to stay sane?
Bill Miller: I bake a lot of bread. I know that you don't bake bread so much.
Lisa Bodnar: No I don't.
Bill Miller: I've been baking for a long time. Actually I started baking sort of surmise seriously when I was in college. I've made pies, I've made pizza. I've made forever... I've made pizza on three continents.
Lisa Bodnar: That's a strange fact a strange fact.
Bill Miller: It is, isn't it?
Lisa Bodnar: Which continents?
Bill Miller: Africa, South America and North America. With pizza, I make the crust, I make the sauce, I don't make the cheese.
Lisa Bodnar: Did he say, "I don't make the cheese?". I'm glad you clarified that.
Bill Miller: But you know what?
Lisa Bodnar: I would have been like, "I assume he makes the cheese too."
Bill Miller: My daughter spent all day yesterday making cheese at her apartment in North Carolina.
Lisa Bodnar: So you remember Jill Reedy?
Bill Miller: Yeah, sure.
Lisa Bodnar: Okay. She always tells a story about visiting a cheese factory. Is that what it's called? I don't know, where you make cheese.
Bill Miller: Yeah.
Lisa Bodnar: A industrial cheese factory and that you got to churn the cheese and that, I mean, this was long time ago, and there was a man who stood in the vat of cheese and he would turn it. His arms out, he was a turnstile himself, and she said he was wearing, maybe he had no shirt on or he had a tank top on. And she would say that he... she could see his hairy armpits in the cheese.
Bill Miller: How will I ever eat cheese again?
Lisa Bodnar: Right and that ruined cheese for a long time for her. And so when you said that your daughter was making cheese, the first thing I thought was...
Bill Miller: I have photographic evidence that she was not standing...
Lisa Bodnar: That's a lot of cheese.
Bill Miller: That's a lot of cheese.
Lisa Bodnar: To stand in it. If you could choose to be an Olympic athlete at the snap of your fingers, what would be your sport?
Bill Miller: Wow. There's so many.
Lisa Bodnar: Really? What are the top three?
Bill Miller: I don't really think of this as an Olympic sport, but I would say baseball first because it is an Olympic sport nowadays.
Lisa Bodnar: When did you stop playing baseball as a kid?
Bill Miller: The end of college.
Lisa Bodnar: Oh, you played in college?
Bill Miller: I played all through college, yeah.
Lisa Bodnar: Well, I had no idea that you were this crazy good athlete. So that's number one. What are the other couple of sports you'd play?
Bill Miller: I'd be a sprinter.
Lisa Bodnar: Okay.
Bill Miller: I ran indoor track in high school, the 60 yard dash, which is as short as you can run. I think as a kid I would have said the long jump.
Lisa Bodnar: Oh, that's so hard.
Bill Miller: Yeah, but it's kind of cool. You sprint down the thing and then get all covered in sand.
Lisa Bodnar: That's true. That seems on brand actually. Yeah.
Bill Miller: But as an aside, I did have my elementary school standing long jump record for [inaudible] years.
Lisa Bodnar: What was it?
Bill Miller: I don't remember but to be completely open about this...
Lisa Bodnar: Yes please.
Bill Miller: I'm in my high school's Hall of Fame. It's actually called "The Wall of Fame." Yeah.
Lisa Bodnar: Okay. Listeners, all this stuff about imposter syndrome, is totally a lie. Bill Miller is here brag about his...
Bill Miller: Wall of Fame.
Lisa Bodnar: Why were you on the Wall of Fame?
Bill Miller: For football and baseball.
Lisa Bodnar: Were you record setting and...?
Bill Miller: Well, I was all league multiple times and stuff like that.
Lisa Bodnar: Were you All-American?
Bill Miller: I was all-state.
Lisa Bodnar: Nice. First team?
Bill Miller: Second team, all-state football.
Lisa Bodnar: Okay. Well, you should have said that.
Bill Miller: Yeah, sorry. Depends on which all-state actually.
Lisa Bodnar: Oh, excuse me. Oh my gosh. I just thought you were this sweet, smart, nerdy guy. Did you go to college and play football and play baseball?
Bill Miller: I played football for my first year and I played baseball four years. It was a huge decision not to play football my sophomore year. I was just really deeply worried that I was going to disappoint people. Making that phone call to the coach that I wasn't going to play, I was so anxious and he was like, "Okay".
Lisa Bodnar: We can fill that seat with someone else.
Bill Miller: Exactly.
Lisa Bodnar: Thanks Bill.
Bill Miller: You're welcome. This was fun. You never said hello like you normally do in your...
Lisa Bodnar: Oh yeah. Should we do that now?
Bill Miller: Should we do that?
Lisa Bodnar: Okay. Hi Bill. I was going to keep a straight face. It was you that screwed it up.
Bill Miller: Maybe you should just use that.