Robert Miller is an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Queen's University, Belfast. He was a co‑founder of ARK and is a former Associate Director.

His career focused on questions of social mobility, broadly conceived; beginning with quantitative academic survey work as Research Associate and then Principal Investigator on the project ‘Determinants of Occupational Status and Mobility in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic’, the benchmark study of social mobility in Ireland, and continuing with often highly controversial applications of mobility techniques to the investigation of religious discrimination and gender and political involvement in Northern Ireland. He helped create the European Sociological Association at the beginning of the 90s and served a term as its General Secretary. He moved to qualitative biographical methods in mid-career and directed Euroidentities, a major European Commission-funded investigation of European identity.

He is now largely retired but maintains an interest in academic life, mainly through the use of in-depth family histories to investigate poverty escapes and the intergenerational transmission of poverty within families in developing countries.