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ChEnected is introducing readers to the recipients of AIChE’s 2022 Institute and Board of Directors’ Awards, AIChE’s highest honors. Recipients are nominated by the chemical engineering community and voted upon by the members of AIChE’s volunteer-led Awards Committee. The Board of Directors’ Award honorees are nominated by the community and selected by AIChE’s Executive Committee.
AIChE’s Industrial Research and Development Award recognizes individuals or teams working in industries served by chemical engineers, for innovation that has resulted in the commercial development of new products and/or new processes for making useful products. The award is being sponsored by AbbVie.
The recipient of the 2022 Industrial R&D Award is Jose E. Tabora, Senior Scientific Director at Bristol Myers Squibb in New Brunswick, NJ. He is being recognized for his work in the development and characterization of drug substance processes through innovations in modeling, design of experimentation, data analysis, and visualization.
Dr. Tabora and the other Institute and Board of Directors’ Award honorees will receive their prizes at the 2022 AIChE Annual Meeting, November 13–18 in Phoenix, Arizona.
Over the past 25 years, Jose Tabor has worked for companies including Merck, Eli Lilly, and Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) in the area of drug substance development, and primarily in the chemical synthesis of small molecules intended for oral dosage. Today, within BMS’s Chemical Process Development department, he is developing software to facilitate data integrity and to increase access and utilization of mathematical models.
Tabor is an enthusiastic champion of the use of such mathematical models and analysis for pharmaceutical process development, and specifically the use of mechanistic and statistical models for process optimization and risk management. He has contributed to technologies that facilitate the production, deployment, and consumption of modeling, ultimately influencing and improving business decisions. A primary deliverable of his work has been cognitive instruments that increase model interpretability. Also, as a member of the Enabling Technologies Forum, he led a project that permitted the sharing of precompetitive models across different pharmaceutical companies.
An AIChE Fellow, Tabor previously received an AIChE Award for Excellence in Quality by Design. He has held adjunct faculty positions in the graduate chemical engineering programs at Manhattan College and Stevens Institute of Technology, where he has taught courses in chemical reactor design, reaction kinetics, and data science.
He received his BS in chemical engineering from Louisiana State University, and his MS and PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Virginia under the supervision of professors John L. Hudson and Robert J. Davis, respectively.
This fall, ChEnected is presenting profiles of all the 2022 Institute and Board of Directors’ Award recipients. You can read about other award winners in this series, and please stop back on ChEnected to meet more of this year’s honorees.