PMSE Distinguished Service Award

2022 Award Winner

Dr. Timothy J. Bunning, AFRL

Dr. Timothy J. Bunning  is the Chief Technology Officer for Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), serving as the corporate-level science and technology interface for a government workforce of ~6,000 people in the laboratory’s nine technology directorates and 711th Human Performance Wing. He has a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Connecticut, is active in numerous technical communities and is a Fellow of AFRL, the Optical Society of America, the Society of Optical Engineering, the American Physical Society, the American Chemical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Materials Research Society and the Polymeric Materials Science and Engineering Division of ACS. His research interests center on responsive optical, electro- optical and photo-optical structured organic and hybrid materials and approaches for utility in optical sensing, laser beam control and filtering (modulation) applications. He has co-authored more than 300 refereed papers and more than 130 proceedings and holds 18 patents. He is an adjunct professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology.

Tim has served PMSE through a variety of roles during his career including serving on the technical programming committee back in the day, as a long-time Member-at-Large, organizing numerous symposia, and most recently rotating through the PMSE Executive Committee serving as the Treasurer for two years (2017-2018), Program Chair (2019), Chair Elect (2020), Chair (2021), and Past Chair (2022).  Tim states “It has been a pleasure to build a network of close colleagues and friends, and I would recommend early volunteerism into the division and the larger technical community as a whole. Those connects made through these interactions have legs and will serve young S&E’s into the future”.  He is humbled to receive the award  and happy that things are getting back to normal with regard to national meetings and face-to-face contact within the community.  The last 24 months has been a challenge regarding the ‘PMSE division norms’ with the constantly changing national and ACS rules due to the COVID situation.