People in Control: Francis J. Doyle III

NOTE: This is an overview of the entire article, which appeared in the April 2013 issue of the IEEE Control Systems Magazine.
Click here to read the entire article.

When one embarks on a particular career path, there are often many twists and turns along the way. In a recent issue of IEEE Control Systems Magazine (CSM), an interview with Francis J. (Frank) Doyle III illustrates his own serpentine route to success. Currently a Mellichamp Professor of Process Control in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Doyle developed his interest in the control field in an undergraduate elective course at Princeton. Doyle remembers “being fascinated by principles of feedback and the mathematical analysis of dynamic systems.” After his senior year, he studied at the University of Cambridge for a year, taking courses in control engineering. Following that year he began his Ph.D at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) on the topic of robust nonlinear control of chemical reactors.

Doyle was enjoying the exciting control and dynamics research atmosphere at Caltech, but it was at this point that his career took “a very interesting turn.” He accepted a visiting scientist position at the DuPont Company where he worked on three different projects bio-inspired controller design based on the beat-to-beat regulation of blood pressure. “That began a career-long fascination with biological control principles,” said Doyle.

Some of Doyle’s research interests include working with his team studying biophysical networks that “range from gene regulatory networks to protein signaling networks to intercellular coupling.” In the interview, Doyle provides a more detailed description of this particular research, including modeling tauopathies (a group of neurodegenerative diseases characterized by accumulation of tau protein in the brain) in Alzheimer’s disease and biomarker discovery for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Doyle has been teaching control related courses at UCSB including a required senior-level class on process dynamics and control. Through the years, he has also taught graduate control courses on robust control, nonlinear control, and model predictive control at Purdue, Delaware and UCSB. “I would characterize my teaching style as ‘varied’ in the sense that I do not rely on one single modality for conveying information,” said Doyle. Mixing traditional verbal lectures with visuals such a PowerPoint and movies, Doyle “strives to convey complex ideas” in numerous ways in order to engage as many students as possible.

Along with his varied positions as teacher and researcher, Doyle has authored four books, each of which he discusses briefly during the interview. He is presently the director of the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies (ICB), “an Army-funded research center that is comprised of 60 faculty members from UCSB, Caltech, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.” The ICB has been operational for ten years and was recently awarded a renewal for another five years.

In his leisure time, Doyle enjoys spending time with his wife Diana and their three children in a variety of outdoor activities including hiking, downhill skiing, soccer, and sailing to name a few. Doyle’s favorite sport for competition is sailboat racing.