THE COLLEGE

Before becoming friends, Jane and Jeff lived wildly different experiences at IU. For Jeff, IU mostly extended as far as the biology department: “As a graduate student, you don’t have a lot of discretionary time. With how focused you are, the world is fairly small and you don’t tend to meet as many people.”

In many ways, Jeff’s world at IU revolved around his thesis advisor, Dr. Charles Bixler Heiser, Jr., known fondly to his students and friends as “Charley.” Dr. Heiser was already a giant in the field of botany as a leading authority on sunflowers and hybridization, as well as one of those rare ambassadors bridging scientific cloisters and the popular awareness. Heiser’s particular brand of humor and tendency to lose himself in his research trickled down to his graduate students, allowing Jeff and others to carve out their own areas of interest and expertise with the same sense of obsessive wonder that their mentor brought to his own research.

“It was never work for Charley—it was more like a full‐time hobby,” says Jeff, who approached his own research with a similarly fond fervency.

For Jane on the other hand, as a young Roman Catholic girl arriving to IU from a small rural Indiana town, college was her first taste of a wider world.

“Going to an institution as large as IU and meeting people of color and of different faiths, it made me realize that people are people are people,” Jane says. “We may have vastly different backgrounds and look different, but you know what? We’re just people. And for somebody growing up in such a backward part of the state as I did, that was revelatory.”

Jane made the most out of her new environment: dressing up to see Dennis James play the organ for Halloween, acting as an extra sitting in the crowd at the 10^th Street Stadium in the filming of Breaking Away, watching movies at Whittenberger Auditorium in the Indiana Memorial Union, studying chemistry notes during her roommate’s French horn recitals, cheering on the men’s basketball team during their championship season of 1976, and—on one memorable and icy winter morning—getting a ride from Coach Lee Corso to Mass at St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church.

As Jeff and Jane got to know each other at Bear’s, they recognized in each other a kindred spirit with shared values. Jane became a regular partner on nature walks with Jeff or helping collect plant samples for Jeff’s thesis research in Spencer or Ellettsville. Once she graduated and moved back to her hometown, however, their paths diverged. Neither expected that fate would land them next door to each other.

Jeff had just moved into his new apartment, when he received a letter from Jane with a life update: “She sends me this letter from her hometown saying, ‘I got a job in Bloomington. My mom and I found an apartment right behind the optometry building.’” It was the unit next door to Jeff’s.

And as next-door neighbors, the two became inseparable. On one particularly “terrible” day that fall, Jane found herself walking home eager to tell Jeff all about her travails. “I stopped in my tracks and said ‘Well, shit. I love him.’”

Despite this revelation, Jane “tried to be cool about it” and never brought it up. Meanwhile, Jeff had already developed romantic feelings. About a month after Jane’s realization, Jeff turned to her while they watched TV together one weekend and casually said, “Don’t you think we ought to just get married?”

“Yeah,” she replied. So they did.

Fast-forward to the present: the Doyles have been married for nearly 45 years and—thanks to an early career-pivot of Jane’s from optometry to lab technology—worked together for over three decades. They are co-authors on over 50 research papers enabled by the rise of plant molecular biology as a growing field over the 1980s and ’90s, particularly during Jane’s 30-year tenure running their lab at Cornell University’s School of Integrated Plant Science before she retired in 2015. So what is the key to a long-lasting marriage and partnership?

“You have to be best friends,” Jane says. “If you don’t really like each other, love cannot flourish, nor can it alone cement a relationship.”

Jeff adds, “We weren’t blessed with children, so I think we use all the playfulness that we would have loved to lavish on children on each other instead.”

Another constant in the Doyles’ lives have been their strong ties to and personal investment in their academic community. Jeff has received numerous recognitions as a student mentor at Cornell, and the couple maintains a commitment to support the academic institutions—especially in ways that will specifically support graduate students, an often under-funded demographic.

“There’s plenty of work that faculty do, but the actual work gets done by graduate students and post-docs, graduate students in particular,” explains Jeff. “I love grad students. I love mentoring them. From someone who listens to me tell them about scientific topics, to someone with whom I can have a real, exploratory conversation, pushing the limits of knowledge in our field—that is incredibly rewarding. And it is comforting to know that the torch of knowledge has been passed on and is in safe hands.”

Neither of the Doyles holds this faith in graduate students lightly. They have regularly supported the IU Department of Biology over the years, and recently documented a planned estate gift to continue providing for emerging biological scientists for years to come.

"In the life sciences, graduate students are major creative engines of research and discovery,” says Armin Moczek, Department of Biology Chair. “Creativity and productivity necessitate the freedom to go where 'the data take you', which critically rests upon the financial support we can provide to our graduate students.”

The Doyles’ planned gift will support an existing fund named in honor of Jeff’s IU thesis advisor who shared his love of botany among the sunflowers all those years ago: the Charles B. Heiser, Jr. Graduate Fellowship in Plant Evolution.

When Jeff spoke at Dr. Heiser’s memorial in 2010, he shared how his mentor had inspired him: “To love what you do, to have a hobby as a job and to recognize how fortunate you are to be able to do what you most enjoy doing—that’s what Charley taught me.”

The Heiser Graduate Fellowship continues Heiser’s legacy by designating funds to support the graduate students studying plant evolution and allowing them the environment in which to develop a similar love for the field and pursue viable career paths—something the Department of Biology cannot necessarily provide without intentional giving from supporters like the Doyles.

“Both full semester fellowships and summer support provide key resources,” says Dr. Moczek, “Often when students need them the most: when early discoveries motivate major research projects, or when seasonally significant research opportunities present themselves during a narrow time window. Here, recurring and long-term gifts are especially helpful to our students because they allow us to plan, prepare, and guarantee the most impactful return on investment."

When Jeff and Jane look back at IU, they see both the past that shaped and joined them and a future they can champion.

“Students are the voters of tomorrow,” Jane says. “Graduate students are the teachers of tomorrow, the researchers who will discover the next major advancement. I came to IU as a very narrow-minded little girl, and I left as an open-minded woman. I hope every person who goes to college has that maturation process. It was critically important to the woman who I am today, and of course that feeds into why we’re willing to support Indiana University, because it was just such a formative place for me and for Jeff, too.”

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