The New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology on Tuesday named Michael Doyle, Ph.D. as vice president for research at the university in Socorro.
His first day will be Jan. 17 according to an email from New Mexico Tech President Stephen G. Wells, Ph.D. to university students, staff and faculty announcing Doyle's appointment.
"As New Mexico Tech's vice president for research, he will be the chief promoter of creativity and innovation and the facilitator of the university's research mission," Wells said in the email.
Doyle will oversee New Mexico Tech's external funding portfolio and annual research expenditures, which amount to approximately $550 million and $50 million, respectively, according to the email.
"I'm excited about the prospect of helping to move the university forward and really push a research focus that's impact-driven, with a real focus on projects that solve problems," Doyle said in an interview with Albuquerque Business First on Jan. 11. "In solving those problems we then create new knowledge, new discoveries and new technologies."
Doyle co-founded Eolas Technologies Inc., a bioinformatics company that spawned from cloud systems research conducted while leading the University of California San Francisco's Center for Knowledge Management. The company's website includes a timeline showing how it led the development of cloud computing technology.
The last in a family of patents that Eolas held for its early cloud technologies expired recently, which Doyle said gave him the impetus to move on to a new role.
"I had committed to see the process through to the end of the life of that technology, and it had gotten to that point," Doyle said about his work with Eolas.
He earned a doctorate degree in cell and structural biology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1991, and he's recently served on the editorial board of Blockchain in Healthcare Today, an open-access, peer-reviewed biomedical sciences journal.
Nelia Dunbar, Ph.D., has acted as interim vice president for research at New Mexico Tech since Feb. 22, 2022, after Van Romero, Ph.D., who previously served in the role, took over as director of space science programs at the university.
"New Mexico Tech is just such a wonderful institution," Doyle said. "For a small sized school in terms of [the] number of students and faculty, it has a tremendous amount of research output. It punches above its weight."
