After completing his service, Knowles returned to Oxford, enrolling in the prestigious Balliol College, where he earned a B.A. in chemistry in 1959 and a masters in the same subject two years later. In 1960, he married Jane Sheldon Davis, also the daughter of an academic.

"He had a tremendous vitality, and he was a great dancer," Jane Knowles says. "I played the violin, and he played the piano, and we sang in all the same choruses."

Knowles won tenure as a chemist at Oxford, but traveled extensively to the U.S., visiting the California Institute of Technology, Yale University and Harvard during the '60s and early '70s.

In 1974, firmly esconsced in Oxford academia as his father and grandfather had been before him, Knowles opted for a change of scenery and accepted tenure at Harvard.

Jane Knowles said that when she came to America, she left a life as the spouse of an Oxford faculty member that greatly differed from her years as an Oxford undergraduate.

"As a faculty wife, you disappeared when the faculty members went out to dinner. The wives would sort of stay home and have a boiled egg," she says, noting that her husbands' colleagues at American schools made a point of inviting her as well.

"America was always fun to come to," she adds.

Timothy F. Knowles, youngest of Jeremy and Jane's three sons, was nine when his home shifted across the Atlantic. Knowles refers to his oldest son, Sebastian, Timothy, and middle child Jay as "one English, one American and one bilingual."

"Absolutely never have I heard him raise his voice. There always had to be a rationale," says Timothy, 31, now a student at the Graduate School of Education (GSE). "My father is nothing if not deeply reasoned."

The first word Jane Knowles uses to describe her husband is "driven."

"He is and he's always been deeply involved in whatever he does," she says. "As a chemist, he's totally absorbed, and as a dean he's totally absorbed. He really loves his job."

Timothy says that from the age of eight on, he would fix his father a gin-and-tonic after work, and talk with him over hors d'eouvres and carrots before dinner.

"Dad was definitely always consistently there, to the minute," Timothy Knowles says. "If ever there was an issue or a problem at school, he would always be there."

Timothy Knowles says he shares his father's passion for working with his hands. Along with a capacity for solving problems through trial and error, Knowles says this love for handiwork is an inheritance from his own father.

"We were very poor in those days, and if father needed a wall, you figured out how to make a wall and you made it," Knowles says. "There was very much a sense of experimentation and figuring things out for yourself."