Vice President for Research
Contact Information for Dr. Michael Doyle
Mailing Address:
Dr. Michael Doyle Research & Economic Development New Mexico Tech 801 Leroy Place Brown Hall, 200C Socorro, NM 87801 E-mail: mike.doyle@nmt.edu Phone: 575-835-5646
Dr. Michael Doyle, a scientist, educator, entrepreneur, inventor, and the creator of fundamental technologies that underlie such products as the Cloud, blockchain/cryptocurrency systems, spatial genomics, and mobile intelligent assistants, is New Mexico Tech's Vice President for Research & Economic Development.
In his role, Dr. Doyle serves as chief official of the New Mexico Tech Research & Economic Development Division - responsible for championing Tech's numerous research programs and for leading the division's administrative and policy making activities; advocating for New Mexico Tech's research mission and opportunities throughout the Institute, and overseeing the Division's current external funding portfolio of approximately $323 million and annual research expenditures exceeding $115 million.
While Dr. Doyle's role involves acting as an external advocate for New Mexico Tech's research activities, he is also active in mentoring new faculty members as they establish their research programs, encouraging diversity and affirmative action across the Division, identifying emerging research opportunities, and vitalizing development of Tech's interdisciplinary research values.
Dr. Doyle received his bachelor’s degree in 1983 from the Department of Biocommunication Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and his PhD in cell and structural biology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 1991.
From 1989 to 1993, Dr. Doyle served as the Director of the Biomedical Visualization Laboratory at UIC. During his sabbatical at UIUC, while working with Dr. Paul Lauterbur (2003 Nobel Laureate), on the application of micro-MRI techniques to embryo imaging, Dr. Doyle created the Visible Embryo Project (VEP), a multi-institutional collaboration to create a national online "metacenter" computational and information resource on early human development.
Dr. Doyle then moved to the University of California, San Francisco, where he served as Director for the Center for Knowledge Management. While at UCSF Medical Center, in 1993, Dr. Doyle led a research team that developed the fundamental web technologies that enabled browsers for the first time to act as platforms for fully interactive embedded applications, in the process pioneering revolutionary web technologies such as streaming media and Cloud computing.
To assist in commercializing related technologies, Dr. Doyle founded Eolas Technologies Inc., where he was the architect of research and development efforts, generating over $250 million in research revenue.
Dr. Doyle's 1995 invention of code signing has become the worldwide de facto standard for securing executable web content. His work in high-performance biological computing created the field of spatial genomics in 2000.
Dr. Doyle is widely recognized as the father of Spatial Biology. In January of 2021, Spatial Biology was named Method of the Year by Nature. In February of 2023, Nanostring, a Spatial Biology industry leader, interviewed Dr. Doyle about his creation of the field in the mid-1990s. In the article, The Birth of Spatial Genomics, Dr. Doyle tells the story of how, in the late 1990s, he led the team that invented the first system for Spatial Genomics, enabling the multi-
Based upon his team’s work, Dr. Doyle and his collaborators were included in Sigma Xi’s 2021 October Madness Sweet Sixteen, for the Physiology or Medicine category, which lists the sixteen individuals or groups that Sigma Xi members believed to have been the most likely to win each of the 2021 Nobel Prizes.
On October 27, 2022, Dr. Doyle gave a Distinguished Keynote Address, entitled “The Visible Embryo Project: The Ontogeny of Technology,” at the National Academy of Inventors NJIT Workshop on Sustainable Societies: Data Revolution – Innovations to Global Solutions and Next-Generation Cyber-Infrastructure, at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. This talk discussed three of the major world-changing technology spin-offs from the Visible Embryo Project: the Cloud, Spatial Transcriptomics, and distributed blockchain technology.