Will Miller, a leader with experience in business, civic revitalization and philanthropy, became the second president of The Wallace Foundation in 2011.
The former chairman of Irwin Management Co., a privately-owned investment management firm in Columbus, Indiana, Miller has significant leadership experience in the civic, nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. He has served on the boards of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Yale University and Public Radio International, where he served five years as chairman of the board, and played key roles in a variety of civic and educational reform efforts in Indiana.
Miller had a long career with Irwin Management, serving from 1983 to 1990 as president and CEO and as its chairman from 1990 to 2011. During the 1980s, Miller was also general partner in a venture capital fund and chaired a real estate development firm that was affiliated with Irwin Management. From 1990 to 2009, he served as chairman and CEO of Irwin Financial, a publicly-held financial services company separate from Irwin Management. He began his business career by spending a year as a section manager in an engine assembly plant of Cummins, Inc., and two years as an associate at Warburg Pincus LLC of New York, N.Y.
Miller has long been committed to public education, improving economic opportunity and civic revitalization. He was a founding member of the Community Education Coalition of Columbus, a regional partnership of school superintendents, community college leaders, business executives and others that received $38 million from The Lilly Endowment to implement EcO15, an innovative initiative focusing on education and careers in advanced manufacturing, healthcare and hospitality/tourism for 10 counties in southeastern Indiana. He has served as a co-chair of the Central Indiana Partnership, a coalition of regional CEOs and university presidents focused on economic development. With Columbus’s mayor, Miller co-chaired Vision 20-20, a major civic investment initiative focused on rebuilding the city center of Columbus. In the 1980s, he chaired the Columbus Indiana Economic Development Board, which successfully recruited a number of Japanese manufacturing companies to his community.
Miller currently serves on the board of Cummins, Inc., the Fortune 500 global manufacturer of engines and related technologies, and three mutual funds managed by Capital Research & Management. In 2008, Miller was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an independent, nonpartisan policy research center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He earned a B.A. in English from Yale University in 1978 and an M.B.A. from Stanford University in 1981.