José Tribolet is a Jubilee Distinguished Full Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico. He was Founder and President of INESC - Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores from 1980 to 2020. He was one of the founders of the Computer Science and Engineering degree of IST, in 1989. He was founder of IST's Computer Engineering Department, in 1998.

Professor Tribolet received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from M.I.T. in 1977 and was distinguished by IEEE as one of the 25 pioneers in Digital Signal Processing. He was a Research Scientist in the Acoustics Department at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, from 1977 to 1979, and co-authored two patents during that period.

From his Ph.D. until 1997 he continued his research in the application of digital signal processing to several domains, namely seismic, and speech coding and recognition, having introduced these subjects in the undergraduate and masters curricula of the Electrical and Computer Engineering courses at IST and advised 9 Ph.D. students in these domains until the end of the 90s.

He was one of those responsible for the creation, in 1989, of the Computer Science and Engineering degree of IST, which he coordinated until 1997. During the 1997-98 sabbatical year, he attended the Sloan School of Management at MIT as a graduate student, specializing in Business Information Systems, and conducted research at the Center for Coordination Sciences, with the strategic objective of preparing himself to assume responsibility for guiding the development of the Business Information Systems area of the Computer Engineering Department of Técnico, of which he was one of the founders in 1998.

Professor Tribolet was, during the sabbatical semester of spring 2012, visiting professor at IWI - the Institute for Information Management, of the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland.

He was President of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and President of the Computer Science and Engineering Department at IST. He is a founding member of the Portuguese Academy of Engineering and of the College of Computer Engineering of the Ordem dos Engenheiros. The scientific area to which he has dedicated the last 25 years, formally designated as "Enterprise Engineering", covers aspects of Engineering and Architectural Enterprise, in particular those involving Information Systems, as well as those of Governance and Holistic Transformation, solidly founded on Systems Theory and its Dynamic Control, through the most recent developments of Enterprise Ontology, providing the scientific basis, the theories, methods and tools to deal rationally, as is the engineering practice, with the phenomena of the ongoing intense Digital Transformation. Since 2000, nine PhD's have been successfully completed at IST, under his supervision, in this new domain of Business Engineering.

In 2024, he was awarded a Medal of Scientific Merit by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). The medal was presented during the Encontro Ciência 2024.