A former Skipton man has been presented with an international scientific award after a lifetime of research.

Professor Geoffrey Coyle, a former pupil of Christ Church School and Ermysted's Grammar School, has been presented with a lifetime achievement award from scientific body the Systems Dynamic Society.

The award was presented to Prof Coyle at a ceremony in Quebec, Canada.

After leaving Ermysted's, he won a state scholarship to read mining engineering at The Imperial College of Science and Technology.

During the late 1960s he worked at a college in Leicester, at the London Business School and was awarded with the first PhD in management by the University of Bradford.

In 1967 he was awarded a fellowship to spend a year at Harvard Business School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he first studied a new approach to management problems - system dynamics.

This experience led to Prof Coyle being invited to set up a research group into system dynamics at the University of Bradford Management Centre where he supervised 18 PhDs.

And in the 1980s he went on to act as a defence scientist for NATO.

He lived in Raikeswood Drive for a period in the 1970s but now lives in Swindon. He met his wife Julie, at Skipton's Trinity Methodist Church, when her father Arthur Merritt was owner of a local building firm.

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