It was announced that Francis Doyle will leave the University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB) in August to become dean of Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Science.

At UCSB, Doyle most recently served as associate dean for research at the College of Engineering, encouraging work in the expanding field of bioengineering. In 2003, he was appointed founding associate director of the multi-campus Institute of Collaborative Biotechnologies and later moved up to position of director. In this role, he brought together the research and educational efforts of 55 faculty spanning 15 departments and the campuses of UCSB, Caltech, and MIT.

Doyle graduated from Princeton in 1985 with a BSE in chemical engineering and went on to earn a Certificate of Postgraduate Studies from Cambridge University in 1986, and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Caltech in 1991. He first taught at Purdue University and next at the University of Delaware. In 2002, he was appointed to the Duncan & Suzanne Mellichamp Chair in Process Control at UCSB.

In his research, Doyle applies systems engineering principles to the analysis of regulatory mechanisms in biological systems, which, for example, include the design of drug-delivery devices for diabetes; modeling, analysis, and control of gene regulatory networks underlying circadian rhythms; and computational analysis for developing diagnostics for post-traumatic stress disorder.