This award celebrates individuals who have helped to drive the life sciences forward, at any stage of their career in industry.

Our winner this year is Roby Polakiewicz, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer at Cell Signaling Technology. As one of the company's founding members, he has directed the creation, implementation, and future direction of novel antibody development technologies and R&D Programs.

Roby has displayed impressive dedication to product development in the research reagent industry, scientific rigor at CST and experimental reproducibility over the years. Here's some of the highlights:

Led a move at CST towards the adoption of recombinant antibody cloning and production.
His paper, Antibodies: The Solution is Validation (Nature, February 2015), advocated not only for rigorous validation by manufacturers but also for “journals...to mandate the provision of detailed validation data, protocols, and antibody sources.” Several important scientific journals subsequently implemented his recommendation.
Authored >65 peer-reviewed scientific articles.
Named inventor on >50 patents and patent applications, including for over 4,400 novel phosphorylation sites and associated antibody products.
Oversaw the development and launch of more than 10,000 products.

Andrew Chalmers, CEO of CiteAb, commented: Roby is certainly a deserving winner of CiteAb's Significant Individual Impact Award. He has ensured scientific rigour and reproducibility are at the heart of Cell Signaling Technology's antibody generation and validation processes, something which led to the company's reputation for producing high quality antibodies. I think thousands of researchers will unknowingly owe him a debt of gratitude for their successful experiments and I'm sure many will join me in congratulating Roby!

Our judges remarked on the quality of nominations, with some really impressive individuals nominated, making judging no easy task - so thank you to all nominators this year!

The Judges: