Named in honor of the late John Schoff Millis, Western Reserve University president from 1949-67, Millis Building was built in 1962 to unify the sciences at the University. Millis, the ninth president of Western Reserve University, was the first whose educational and teaching background was in science.

He was a professor of physics at Lawrence College, Appleton, Wis. and served as a research assistant to Nobel laureate and Case physicist Albert A. Michelson at the University of Chicago. John Schoff Millis helped to organize the University Circle Development Foundation (the predecessor to University Circle, Inc.) and was named chancellor emeritus of the federated Case Western Reserve University. He was named an honorary trustee in 1975 and received the University Medal, CWRU's highest honor, in 1977.

Millis Building originally housed laboratories and teaching facilities for biology, chemistry, physics, geology, geography, mathematics and astronomy.It was designed to create an exciting environment for the sciences - one in which the entire body of science grows by cross-fertilization. Millis hoped that, with the construction of the new science building, "the sciences will recognize their kinship and the old isoloation, in which each went its independent way, will give place to a new era of progress."