AIChE’s Industrial Research and Development Award — sponsored by AbbVie — 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.
In 2026, the Industrial R&D Award is being presented to Dr. Kevin Seibert, Vice President, Engineering, Synthetic Molecule Design and Development, Eli Lilly and Company.
Seibert is being recognized for “leading the engineering team responsible for developing, optimizing, and commercializing Mounjaro/Zepbound, Eli Lilly’s GLP-1 drug.” He and the other Institute and Board of Directors’ Award recipients will be honored at the 2026 AIChE Annual Meeting.
About Seibert and his work
Seibert has spent more than 30 years shaping the process development and commercialization of small-molecule and peptide therapeutics. Before joining Lilly in 2004, he spent nearly a decade at Merck Research Labs, serving as Area Head of the Natural Products Isolation Pilot Plant and as a Senior Research Fellow in Chemical Engineering R&D. He rose through Lilly's development organization from Principal Research Scientist to Engineering Advisor, Senior Engineering Advisor, and Associate Vice President/Engineering Fellow before being named Vice President and Senior Engineering Fellow in 2023.
Seibert has driven the process engineering behind a number of marketed compounds, guiding synthetic routes from early clinical development through commercial launch. He was project lead for the optimization and commercialization of both the linear and hybrid manufacturing routes for tirzepatide (Mounjaro, Zepbound), directing teams of chemists, analytical chemists, and engineers to deliver a robust, high-quality commercial synthesis and manufacturing process.
Novel approaches underpin GLP-1 development
Under his leadership, the team conceived and drove novel elements of an economically superior hybrid route, including flow-based transformations and nanofiltration to replace traditional isolations, and developed a completely new methodology for manufacturing synthetic peptides through continuous coupling of SPPS-grown fragments. This platform continues to evolve toward chemically convergent, purely liquid-phase peptide synthesis strategies aimed at eliminating solid-phase peptide synthesis altogether and enabling more advanced sub-fragments to be designated as registered starting materials.
Seibert is an elected Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and served as Past Chair of AIChE's Pharmaceutical Discovery, Development and Manufacturing (PD2M) Forum. He has also served on the boards of the IQ Consortium and the Emerging Technologies Consortium, contributing to industry policy and regulatory strategy discussions. He is the author or co-author of more than 80 technical publications, book chapters, and presentations, and holds three patents.
