JOSE M. AGUILERA is currently Emeritus Professor of Chemical and Food Engineering at the P. Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC) in Santiago. A chemical engineer, he holds an MSc. degree in food technology from MIT, an MBA from Texas A&M University and a Ph.D. in food science from Cornell University (minor ChemE). His research program has been focused on the role that food microstructure has in health, nutrition, and wellbeing, and includes areas such as structure-property relationships, modeling microstructural changes in foods, food structuring operations and gastronomic engineering.
At the College of Engineering (PUC) he was Associate Dean for 7 years and Head of the Chemical Engineering Department for several periods, being instrumental in its transformation to a world-class educational program (as recognized by ABET). He has published more than 200 articles in international journals, several book chapters and is the author or co-author of 13 books, including Microstructural Principles of Food Processing and Engineering (D.W. Stanley, co-author, 1999), Food Materials Science (P. Lillford, co-editor, 2008) and Edible Structures: the science behind what we eat (2013). He is (or has been) associate editor of J. Food Science (Food Engineering section) and member of the editorial board of Journal of Food Engineering, Food Biophysics and Trends in Food Science & Technology, among other journals, a Fellow of the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) and of the International Association of Food Science and Technology (IAFoST). Among many distinctions he was recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship (1991), the A. von Humboldt Foundation Research Prize (2001), and three of the most prestigious awards of the Institute of Food Technologists of the U.S.: International Award (1993), Research and Development Award (2005) and the Marcel Loncin Research Prize (2006). In 2008 he was awarded the highest scientific honor bestowed by Chile, the National Prize in Applied Sciences and Technology, for contributions to the knowledge in food engineering and the establishment a national and Latin American community. In 2010 he was elected a foreign associate member of the National Academy of Engineering of the United States and in 2014 a member of the Academie d’Agriculture de France. Prof. Aguilera was President of the National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICYT) between 2010 and 2013.