2005 Recipient

In 2005, the awards committee awarded Professor Michael Shuler the award.  Shuler and the late Jay Bailey were considered pioneers in the area of biotechnology. Professor Shuler was a close professional colleague of Jay Bailey’s for almost 30 years.  “Professor Shuler is universally recognized as a father of modern biochemical and bioprocess engineering,” said Daniel I. C. Wang, Chair of SBE. “His contributions to the community in research, education and service to the profession are without parallel.”  Shuler was the first to advocate explicitly integrating molecular and cellular biology into the essence of bioprocess engineering. His ideas led to better understanding of chemical reactions within the cell, cellular regulation and cellular interactions in a large population quantitatively and in a predictable fashion.  MIT’s Professor Greg Stephanopoulos, an SBE Board Member, said the work Professor Shuler has done on the single-cell model has encouraged the development of the field of metabolic engineering. Along with research, Professor Shuler has had a major impact on the teaching of bioprocess engineering.  His textbook, Bioprocess Engineering: Basic Concepts, has defined modern bioprocess engineering and, over the past 12 years, has been the most successful, and widely used, textbook in this area.

During the awards ceremony on November 1, 2005, Michael Shuler presented a lecture to the attendees on “Understanding and Using Microbes:  Systems via Biology and the Biochemical Engineer.”