The business card says everything and nothing, four lines of text meant to encompass a career.

Robert P. Doyle, Ph.D., it reads.

Assistant professor. Syracuse University. Department of Chemistry.

Nothing but the taped-up card adorns Doyle’s office door in the Science and Technology Center’s second floor hallway.

No mention of the surge of new professors added by the chemistry department in the last decade – Doyle was the last one hired in 2005. No mention of how he arrived at SU, years consumed in three different continents by polymers and peptides, Vanadium and Vitamin B. No mention of how the work done by his research team may revolutionize the treatment of diabetes.

But that’s OK. Office doors aren’t supposed to say much else.

Inside his office, Doyle can explain things better. He is precise with his words, and in his Irish accent – where ‘um’ is ’em’ and his wife Niamh is ‘Neev’ – he’s able to elucidate things.

That’s Doyle. Meticulous. Sharp. His jeans flare, his shoes shine, his bald head is shaved tight and smooth.

Except the door is locked and the young professor is running late. But, that’s OK, too. Understandable, even.

Because he might have more important things than this. Next month, his research team’s work, specifically a compound which welds insulin to a B-12 vitamin and allows diabetics to take the drug orally, will be published in pharmaceutical journal ChemMedChem.

The formula has been patented, with successful testing on rats already conducted at SU by Tim Fairchild, one of Doyle’s partners on the project and an assistant professor of exercise science.

The project is moving forward, though it’s still years away from clinical testing on humans.

‘What we need to do now is figure out how to improve upon that and build upon that success,’ Fairchild said. ‘And also we can now look at delivering other types of proteins and things like that – not just insulin.

‘I guess that’s what will take our lives over for the next few years, the next three or four years. So I guess we’ll see how it goes.’

So maybe Doyle is meeting with the university’s lawyers. He could be discussing the pharmaceutical companies SU might partner with to increase the project’s resources.

Or maybe he’s stuck in the lab, working with his team of 12 graduate and undergraduate chemistry students to adjust the derivatives of the lead compound, tweaking the different combinations of elements in search of the right match.

Or maybe he just forgot.

‘He loves his work,’ Fairchild said. ‘So, what’ll happen is, his work will become his passion. So all of a sudden, that means everything’s 110 percent. You basically get going with everything. That’s pretty much how his lab is at the moment.’

Outside his lab, testaments hang to Doyle and his team’s work. Head down a flight of stairs from his office, past a diorama of the periodic table – a Coke can for sodium, a pocket calculator for arsenic, a Centrum bottle for zinc – past safety shower handles that hang from the ceiling like giant can openers.

Taped to the wall, in between posters of Doyle’s other research – crystals, cancer treatment drug AZT fused with folic acid – is the group’s latest breakthrough.

‘Oral Delivery of Insulin Through the Colalamin Uptake Pathway,’ the poster reads, more than a year of work condensed into a 55-inch-by-35-inch sheet of white paper. Doyle follows three other names on the poster: Amanda Petrus and Tony Vortherms, two of his graduate students, and then Fairchild.

It’s work like this that makes Jon Zubieta, chair of the chemistry department, happy.

Few had heard of Doyle when he applied for jobs. But SU’s radar dipped low enough to pick him up. Once Doyle had a chance to interview, his enthusiasm and his research proposals impressed Zubieta.

‘He didn’t come from one of the big East Coast, West Coast universities,’ Zubieta said. ‘He did his graduate work in Ireland (at Dublin’s Trinity College), then his post-doc in Australia (at The Australian National University) and a second post-doc at Yale.

‘But none of the work from the Yale post-doc had come out yet. Most of the work from his graduate career had yet to be published, so I think that a lot of people missed him. But somehow we didn’t.’

Back in the hallway, the dull throb from construction on Sci-Tech’s addition, the Life Science Complex scheduled to be completed in fall 2008, sounds through the otherwise noiseless space. The chance to work at the new facility impressed Doyle. It’s one of the reasons he chose Syracuse.

The double doors in the hallway cut through the pounding and there he is, right hand grasping the real reason for his lateness: a cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee. He sniffles a bit as he approaches, his Irish charm dimmed a bit by a cold.

Seventy-hour weeks sometimes make 9 a.m. meetings difficult, it seems.

Still, it could be worse. Back when he was doing his post-doctorate at Yale, 80-100 hours spent in the lab a week was the norm. This grind? He’s used to it.

Inside the office, he disassembles quickly, hands shuffling through his coat to set down his keys, cell phone, iPod; the rustling sound of hand brushing navy jacket bouncing off the mostly blank, white walls of his office.

He flicks the mouse on his computer to warm it up, a baby’s face staring back at him as the background. It’s Mia, his 2-and-a-half year old niece.

Family means something to Doyle. It delayed his arrival in the States: He turned down an offer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology because Niamh, his girlfriend at the time, was denied a visa. The couple wasn’t yet married.

So they spent a year in Australia, married, then traveled to Yale. Now in Central New York, Doyle said he’s ready to settle. To raise children here, maybe replace Mia’s face with one of his own children as his background.

Syracuse isn’t a stepping stone.

But he’ll talk about this later. Now, he’s still at his computer, trying to shake off the dreariness of this early November cold snap.

‘All right,’ he says, facing Mia’s wondering eyes, that cold planting a husk in his voice, ‘What’s up?’

The start of something big, it seems.

Published on November 12, 2007 at 12:00 pm