He is the Duncan & Suzanne Mellichamp Chair in Process Systems Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In 2016, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for the design of methods for complex distillation and crystallization processes.
[3] Michael F. Doherty worked as a postdoctoral instructor for a year at the University of Minnesota after finishing his PhD in August 1976.
Doherty received the E. V. Murphree Award in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry from the American Chemical Society in 2012.
[5] He met his future wife, Margaret H. Ricks, during the early 1970s and lived with her in Greenwich Village between graduating from Imperial College London and starting his PhD program.