Jose E. Tabora is a Senior Scientific Director in the Chemical Process Development department at Bristol Myers Squibb in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He received a B.S. in chemical engineering from Louisiana State University in 1990 and a M.S. and Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Virginia under Profs. J. L. Hudson and R. J. Davis, respectively.
Over the past 25 years, he has worked for Merck, Eli Lilly and BMS in drug substance development, primarily in chemical synthesis of small molecules intended for oral dosage. He has enthusiastically championed the use of mathematical models and analysis for pharmaceutical process development, specifically the use of mechanistic and statistical models for process optimization and risk management. He has contributed to technology that facilitates the production, deployment, and consumption of modelling, ultimately influencing and improving business decisions. A primary deliverable of his work has been cognitive instruments that increase model interpretability.
He is an active member of the Enabling Technology Forum, for which he led a project to enable sharing of precompetitive models across different pharmaceutical companies. His current work is focused on the development of software to facilitate data integrity and to increase access and utilization of mathematical models.
He received the AIChE Award for Excellence in Quality by Design in 2011 and was inducted as Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers at the Institute’s Annual Meeting in 2019. He has held adjunct faculty positions in the graduate Chemical Engineering programs of Manhattan College in New York, and Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey where he taught classes in Chemical Reactor Design, Reaction Kinetics, and Data Science.