Dr. Michael Doyle, a scientist, educator, entrepreneur, inventor, and the creator
of fundamental technologies that underlie such fields as spatial biology next-generation
AI, the Cloud, Web cybersecurity, and blockchain/cryptocurrency systems, is New Mexico
Tech's Provost Fellow, and Professor & Chair of the Department of Biology.
From 2023 to early 2025, he served as NMT’s Vice President for Research and Economic
Development. In that role, Dr. Doyle served 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 external funding portfolio of approximately
$323 million and an increase in NSF-reported annual research expenditures from $28
million to over $128 million. While Dr. Doyle's VPR role involved acting as an external
advocate for New Mexico Tech's research activities, he was 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 of science degree from the Department of Biocommunication
Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and his PhD in cell biology and
anatomy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_Embryo_Project.
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 help secure this new web application platform,
Dr. Doyle invented code signing in 1995, which has since become the worldwide de facto
standard for securing executable web content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_signing.
To assist the University of California in commercializing the web-technology patents,
Dr. Doyle founded Eolas Technologies Inc., where he was the architect of research
and development efforts, generating over $250 million in research revenue since 2008.
Dr. Doyle is widely recognized as the father of Spatial Biology, a field recently
recognized for the second time as Nature’s Method of the Year, a distinction never
before bestowed twice upon a single set of scientific methods. In February of 2023,
Nanostring (now a part of Bruker), 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 transcriptomics, enabling the multi-dimensional
spatial mapping of gene expression within tissue morphological context https://nanostring.com/blog/the-birth-of-spatial-genomics/.
Two additional articles about his role in the creation of the field of spatial biology
appeared in November of 2023 in BioTechniques (https://www.future-science.com/doi/10.2144/btn-2023-0093, https://www.biotechniques.com/pcr-sequencing/spatial-biology-a-collaboration-between-the-biological-sciences-and-information- technologies/). And a podcast interview about the origins of the field recently appeared on SoundCloud:
(https://soundcloud.com/allison-rae-890885323/interview-of-dr-doyle-father-of-spatial-biology )
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 believe to be
the most likely to win a Nobel Prize soon for their work https://www.sigmaxi.org/news/keyed-in/post/keyed-in/2021/09/14/2021-october-madness-sweet-16
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.