The Society for Biological Engineering (SBE) — a technical community of The American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) — will celebrate 20 years as a unifying entity within the ever-diversifying bioengineering space with activities slated for the 2024 AIChE Annual Meeting, which will take place October 27–31 in San Diego, California. In addition to pertinent technical sessions organized by AIChE’s Food, Pharmaceutical and Bioengineering Division and the Pharmaceutical Discovery, Development and Manufacturing Forum (PD2M), SBE will host an awards ceremony and reception on October 29, featuring retrospective commentary from leaders including SBE Chair Georges Belfort (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute).
Honorees at the award ceremony will include K. Dane Wittrup of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who has been selected to present the 2024 James E. Bailey Award Lecture at the Annual Meeting. Also to be honored is the recipient of the 2024 Biotechnology Progress Award for Excellence in Biological Engineering Publication — presented by AIChE’s Biotechnology Progress journal.
AIChE established the Society for Biological Engineering in 2004 to build a bridge between chemical engineering and the biological sciences. Prior to SBE, the interests of AIChE members in the then-emerging field were served by the programming activities of AIChE’s Food, Pharmaceutical and Bioengineering Div. However, that programming was limited to sessions conducted at the AIChE Annual Meeting.
In a written history of SBE, MIT’s Gregory Stephanopoulos — a founder of SBE — noted that, at the time, “many chemical engineers active in biotechnology and biomedical engineering sought a more structured and dedicated collaboration space within AIChE.” The creation of SBE, he added, “would provide a home for chemical engineers in the bio arena and the vehicle for strengthening the presence of biological sciences in the curriculum and the research portfolio of chemical engineering.”
The SBE has responded to the diversifying interests of chemical engineers, bioengineers, and applied scientists through its conferences. Today, SBE’s subject-matter experts help organize more than 15 annual or biennial specialty conferences, which serve the evolving needs of more than 2,000 annual attendees. Among the SBE’s longstanding conferences are Synthetic Biology: Engineering, Evolution & Design (SEED); the International Conference on Accelerating Biopharmaceutical Development; the Metabolic Engineering Conference (organized by AIChE’s International Metabolic Engineering Society); and Commercializing Industrial Biotechnology, to name a few. Among the recently emerging conferences are the International Conference on Microbiome Engineering, the International Conference on CRISPR Technologies, the AfroBiotech Conference, and the mRNA Technology Conference.
SBE’s members represent a spectrum of industries and disciplines, with specializations in bioprocessing, biomedicine, biomolecular applications, and more. For information about SBE and its activities, visit www.aiche.org/sbe.
About AIChE: AIChE is a professional society of more than 60,000 members in more than 110 countries. Its members work in corporations, universities and government using their knowledge of chemical processes to develop safe and useful products for the benefit of society. Through its varied programs, AIChE continues to be a focal point for information exchange on the frontier of chemical engineering research in such areas as nanotechnology, sustainability, hydrogen fuels, biological and environmental engineering, and chemical plant safety and security. More information about AIChE is available at www.aiche.org.