Doyle Temple
Professor of Physics
Hampton University
Doyle A. Temple is a Professor of Physics and the Chair of the Department of Physics at Hampton University, where he has taught for almost 16 years. After becoming Chair of the Department in 1994, he was instrumental in guiding the new Physics Ph.D. program that was established in 1992, and was the first Ph.D. program at Hampton University. Before joining Hampton University he was an Assistant Professor of Physics at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana for six years.
Dr. Temple has served as the Director of three major research centers: the Research Center for Optical Physics funded by NASA, the Center for Lidar and Atmospheric Sciences Students funded by NASA, and the Center for Laser Sciences and Spectroscopy funded by NSF. Dr. Temple has also served as principal investigator or co-principal investigator on projects totaling more than $20 million dollars in research and education grants. He is author or co-author of over 80 publications and conference presentations in refereed journals and conference proceedings. He is also the inventor on a patent for holographic data storage using cylindrical media.
Dr. Temple’s efforts have provided more than 70 students with state-of-the-art research projects in the research centers and in summer undergraduate research internship programs. He served as research advisor for 4 post-doctoral fellows, 2 Ph.D. students, 2 M.S. students, and numerous undergraduates.
Dr. Temple’s teaching encompasses a wide variety of methodologies. He has taught numerous courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level from Introductory Honors Physics to Quantum Electronics and Nonlinear Optics. His instructional methods encourage active collaborations among the students and professor. Students are given basic lectures and then work together in small groups at the board, assisted by Dr. Temple. The students must demonstrate a mastery of the material through written and oral examinations. His outreach programs for K-12 are focused on enticing students into scientific fields using model rocketry as a motivational tool. Every year over 100 K-12 students participate in these programs.
Dr. Temple earned his B.S. in physics from Southern University and his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
"I think I built nearly every Radio Shack electronics kit they made when I was 12 years old. I drooled over the electronics kits in the Health Kit catalogs but they cost much more than my neighborhood grass mowing jobs could handle. As my mother used to say, ‘You don’t have a bedroom, you have a workshop.’"