The warmth and enthusiasm in Karen Joy Miller’s voice sometimes belie the gravity of her message. Miller, a breast-cancer survivor, founded Prevention Is The Cure, an organization that highlights risk reduction as key to reducing the incidence of cancer, autism, Parkinson’s disease, diabetes and many other illnesses. Thanks to her hard-won expertise and the many connections she’s tirelessly created with scientists, politicians and other activists, the Huntington grandmother now serves as a public-interest partner to the director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, one of the 27 agencies under the National Institutes of Health.

Miller’s activism began when she founded the grassroots Huntington Breast Cancer Action Coalition around 1990, several years after she’d been diagnosed. “I had to know why, why did I get cancer — because it did not run in my family — and how I could try to make sure my family didn’t get it,” she confides. “I was terrified of death and starting this organization was a way of keeping the demon in front of me, so I could actively address it.”

As she recovered, her efforts intensified, and Miller’s days — which routinely include 12 to 16 hours of work — take her around Long Island to Albany, Washington DC and beyond. One of the HBCAC’s first major victories came when Huntington Town agreed in 1997 to treat its two municipal golf courses with organic rather than chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Today, she’s especially excited about the $35-million, seven-year federal study for which she fought: It’s investigating the hypothesis that there are times, well before puberty, when the developing mammary gland is particularly vulnerable to environmental factors that may influence breast-cancer risk in adulthood.

Miller’s devotion to her family — husband of 46 years Michael, three children and three grandchildren — has remained constant, but early on Miller spent 20 years as the owner of an interior design firm. Shortly before her breast-cancer diagnosis, she had eased out of the business, planning to redefine her personal and professional goals. In activism, she found the answer of what to do, passionately, for the rest of her life. — Gayle Turim