Prize Recipient

Timothy J. Bunning
Air Force Research Laboratory

Citation:

"For his outstanding accomplishments in developing polymer based materials for optical applications and for elucidating the physics and chemistry underlying their formation."

Background:

Timothy J. Bunning received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering in 1992 from the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Ct. His research was sponsored by an Air Force Office of Scientific Research Doctoral Fellowship where his mentoring laboratory was the Materials and Manufacturing Directorate at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, OH. Tim conducted all of his research on-site at WPAFB in the Hardening Materials Branch (MLPJ), an organization whose interests lie in advanced active and passive optical (photonic) materials. Upon finishing and after a short post-doc at Cornell University, he returned to WPAFB first as an on-site contractor with Science Applications International Corporation and more recently as a government research engineer. He and his team won several publication prizes while he was at SAIC, and more recently the work has been featured in numerous AF success stories. His current research interests center around advanced polymer-based photonic materials and components, specifically multi-dimensional passive and dynamic diffractive structures formed using complex holographic photopolymerization techniques, development of polymer/liquid crystal composites. He is currently the project lead for a diverse internal and external R&D effort that is developing new responsive materials and approaches for integration in optical sensing, laser beam control, and filtering application. He is a member of the American Physical Society, American Chemical Society, and the Materials Research Society.

Selection Committee:

Scott Milner (Chair)