Linda Doyle

Linda E. Doyle is an Irish academic and educator who is the 45th Provost of Trinity College Dublin, the university's chief officer, having assumed the office in August 2021. An electrical engineer, she has had a long academic career at Trinity, from the 1990s, most recently as Professor of Engineering and the Arts, in addition to holding other management roles such as Dean (and Vice-President) of Research. She has also led one telecommunications research centre at the university, and was the founding director of another, the multi-institution organisation known as CONNECT. Doyle has worked as a member of regulatory and advisory bodies in both Ireland, on broadband network strategy, and the UK, on mobile spectrum allocation. She is or has also been a director of public outreach projects such as Science Gallery Dublin and its international network, of two non-profit art galleries, and of two university spin-off companies.

Doyle is a native of Togher, a southside suburb of Cork. She attended Togher Girls National School and then St Angela's College, on Patrick's Hill in northside Cork, before taking her undergraduate degree in electrical engineering in University College Cork, graduating with a B.E.E. in 1989. She moved to Trinity College Dublin (TCD) in 1989, and there completed a M.Sc. in 1993 and a Ph.D. in 1997 and later also a postgraduate diploma in Statistics. Doyle worked in industry for a year, including for Siemens in Germany for a period.

Doyle worked with flexible optical networks, and wireless communications, including spectrum management, reconfigurable mobile networks and cognitive radio. She later also pioneered some work on the crossover between engineering and the creative arts, founding an initiative and working group, the Orthogonal Methods Group (OMG).

After a period of post-doctoral research, Doyle joined the faculty of the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at Trinity College Dublin in the late 1990s. In the late 2000s, while an associate professor, she took up a role as the director of the Centre for Telecommunications Value-chain Research (CTVR), a six-institution telecoms research centre based at TCD. In the mid-2010s, she was appointed the first head of a Science Foundation Ireland (SFI)-supported national research centre focused on telecommunications in the future, CONNECT, and the CTVR was later merged into this. CONNECT was expanded over time, with up to 250 researchers working across ten Irish third-level institutions, and its work has included efforts in the areas of converged, dense, shared and moving networks, as well as nano and low-energy networks. Among the projects launched by Doyle were the "Pervasive Nation" LoRa Internet of Things network and, using that system, a flood and river level monitoring initiative with Dublin City Council. The LoRa project secured 1.8 million euro of research funding, and in conjunction with it, CONNECT joined the LoRa alliance as Trinity's delegate. CONNECT also secured as many as 35 cooperative projects with industry. Doyle personally led the Edge project, funded by SFI under the EU Horizon 2020 programme, with a budget of 6 million euro and 71 researchers, conducting work on digital content technology, telecoms networks and advanced materials. She was appointed as, and as of January 2022 remains, a director of two spin-out companies from CTVR and CONNECT, Software Radio Systems and Xcelerit.

In 2014, she was appointed professor of Engineering and the Arts at the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity. By 2017, she was credited with having won career total awards of more than 70 million euro in research funding for her projects and teams, and supervising 26 Ph.D. candidates, half in Engineering, half in Arts. In January 2018 she became the dean of and vice-president for research at the college, a role she held until 2020.

Doyle wrote a book on certain radio technologies, released in 2009, in print and as an e-book by Cambridge University Press, Essentials of Cognitive Radio. She was also an advisor in the production of the Science Gallery Dublin "exhibition-in-a-box" volume "Systems : User or Used?" (2021).

Doyle has authored or co-authored a wide range of papers, many peer-reviewed, including her most-cited, in the cognitive radio area, Cyclostationary signatures in practical cognitive radio applications, as well as one on spectrum management, Spectrum without bounds, networks without borders, for which she was the lead author, and Painting style transfer for head portraits using convolutional neural networks which treats of software engineering and the arts together. Some of her more recent co-authored papers include one which brought together two network themes and blockchain, Toward Scalable User-Deployed Ultra-Dense Networks: Blockchain-Enabled Small Cells as a Service (2020), another on spectrum management, as a book chapter with Doyle as lead author, Open Access Markets for Capacity and the Inseparability of Spectrum and Infrastructure (2020), and Low Complexity Modem Structure for OFDM-Based Orthogonal Time Frequency Space Modulation (2017). There have also been publications dealing with technologies outside the conventional mobile network space, such as LoRa in A method to enhance ranging resolution for localization of LoRa sensors (2017), and on applications of neural network technology, including Spectrum Monitoring for Radar Bands Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (2017) and A neural-network-based realization of in-network computation for the Internet of Things (2017).

By the 2010s, Doyle was an advisor to the National Broadband Steering Committee in Ireland, Ofcom's Spectrum Advisory Board in the United Kingdom and the Wireless@KTH project at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. She was also chairperson of the board of The Douglas Hyde Gallery (2013–2021) and a member of those of Pallas Studios and the Wireless Innovation Forum. She has also been a judge of Ireland's Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition, and was involved as a board member and in other ways with the Festival of Curiosity, a scientific discovery event for a large audience of children in Dublin.