Introduction to Editorial Board Member: Professor Francis J. Doyle III

In this issue of Bioengineering and Translational Medicine, we are delighted to introduce Professor Francis (Frank) J. Doyle III, the Dean of Harvard’s Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He holds the John A. and Elizabeth S. Armstrong Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Prof. Doyle received his BS degree in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University, his MS degree from Cambridge University (UK), and his PhD degree from the California Institute of Technology. Prof. Doyle started his academic career in 1992 at Purdue University in the Department of Chemical Engineering. In 1997, Prof. Doyle moved to the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Delaware, initially as an associate professor, before becoming a full professor. Between September 2001 and June 2002, he was a Humboldt Research Fellow at the Institute for Systems Theory and Automatic Control at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. In 2002, Prof. Doyle moved to the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). At UCSB, Prof. Doyle held the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Endowed Chair in Process Control. He also began a very fruitful partnership with the Sansum Diabetes Research Institute in Santa Barbara as an Adjunct Senior Investigator. His group was the first to demonstrate the operation of a fully closed and completely automated glucose feedback loop in a clinical trial in diabetic patients. In addition to research and teaching excellence, Prof. Doyle has had a passion for administrative leadership. At UCSB, he held several administration positions. He (co)directed the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies, a UCSB/MIT/Caltech Army sponsored University Affiliated Research Center. Under his leadership, ICB emerged as a globally leading research organization for biologically-inspired technological innovation. Prof. Doyle also served as the chair of the Chemical Engineering department and Associate Dean of Research in the College of Engineering at UCSB. In the latter role, he championed building of UCSB’s bioengineering research enterprise and infrastructure. In July 2015, Prof. Doyle moved to Harvard University as Dean of Paulson School of Engineering. Currently, Dean Doyle is realizing his vision of the new phase of Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences on the back of interdisciplinary bridges with Harvard’s Business and Medical Schools. At the beginning of his career, Prof. Doyle’s research focused primarily on the applications of advanced control schemes on nonlinear, multivariable, constrained industrial processes, with emphasis on particulate systems, and pulp and paper. At Purdue, he met and began a fruitful collaborative research project on glucose control for Type 1 Diabetes with Prof. Nicholas Peppas (an Editorial Board Member). While their paths later diverged, the collaboration seeded a transition in Prof. Doyle’s research portfolio toward biology and biomedical applications. In the past 15 years, Prof. Doyle and his group have created and applied sophisticated tools from control systems theory to analyze the regulatory mechanisms of biological systems with the end goal of being able to manipulate their behaviors. The research has led to impactful advances in the understanding and control of biological systems, particularly in the regulation of blood glucose and circadian rhythms. Over the past two decades, the Doyle group has been at the forefront of the design and synthesis of control algorithms for the development of the artificial pancreas (AP) for type 1 diabetes treatment. In 1999, Prof. Doyle published a seminal paper on model predictive control (MPC) of blood glucose (BG) with his former PhD student, Prof. Robert Parker of U Pittsburgh, and Prof. Nicholas Peppas. Unlike the classical proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller that acts in response to departures from the desired process set point, MPC can anticipate changes in the process outputs (e.g., BG level) and prescribe the optimal control action (e.g., delivery of insulin). Following Prof. Doyle’s pioneering work, many MPC algorithms for the AP have been developed, including landmark contributions from the Doyle group. As evidence of Prof. Doyle’s impact in medicine, MPC has become one of the mainstream control algorithms used in closed-loop BG control in clinical studies. Notably, Prof.