Year Inducted: 2025
With a passion for use inspired basic research, Bruce Tatarchuk’s pursuit of discovery and innovation has made impactful contributions to instruction, research, outreach,
technological leadership, and societal impacts in chemical engineering. His engineering achievements have resulted in substantial regional economic impact through the invention, development, manufacture, and sale of commercial products touching the lives and safety of tens of thousands of Alabamians daily as well as billions of global users each year.
Tatarchuk is the Charles E. Gavin III Endowed Professor of Chemical Engineering at Auburn University where he has taught and conducted research since 1982. He has also launched two companies to assist in the commercialization of the innovations born of research conducted while at Auburn. He co-founded IntraMicron Inc., a Delaware Corp. operating in Auburn in 2001 and, later, a wholly owned subsidiary Sour Gas LLC in 2017.
He joined the engineering faculty at Auburn after earning a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and completing a doctorate in the field from the University of Wisconsin in 1981.
A widely recognized expert in heterogeneous reactive systems and process intensification, he has been the principal investigator on more than $70 million dollars of competitively awarded extramural research contracts to Auburn, and more than double that amount as a collaborating co-investigator. His pioneering work in structured reactor materials has seen applications in various fields, from catalysis to energy storage. His extensive publication and presentation record includes over 300 peer-reviewed articles, numerous reviewed
proceedings and technical abstracts, four book chapters, 110 invite d and plenar y le c tures, and more than 600 technical presentations to esteemed societies in the U.S. and abroad.
In addition, Tatarchuk holds over 100 patents issued in the U.S. and abroad. A number of these patents provide the basis for 13 commercial products currently touching the lives of billions of users each year. Tatarchuk and his team, operating out of his Auburn lab, are widely recognized for a new class of high performance structured chemical reactor materials based on the microfibrous entrapment of highly reactive solids allowing them to operate chemical reactions at much higher steady-state volumetric rates than any group or technology in the world, and inspiring companion applications and impact opportunities for a variety of battery, sorption, and electrochemical systems.
Being the first to conceptualize and co-manipulate both intrabed void and solid reactants within the 1 to 100-micron dimension regime, has sparked numerous advancements forming the basis of what Tatarchuk calls intramicron technology. As but one application, every aircraft flying within the United States and Western Europe is augmented with technology developed and commercialized during his four-decade career of engineering and entrepreneurial excellence at Auburn.
Today, his company, IntraMicron – where he is CEO – is also one of only five global producers of micron diameter metal fibers. Among Tatarchuk’s numerous professional recognitions and awards, his patent portfolio in intramicron technology was formally recognized in 2014 with his induction as a Fellow into the National Academy of Inventors
for “inventions that have positively impacted mankind.”
