Kim Renee Dunbar

"Professor Kim R. Dunbar was born in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania to Frank and Bernice Dunbar and grew with her three sisters Bonnie, Laura and Colleen. She attended Sewickley High School before receiving a B.S. degree in Chemistry with a minor in Mathematics. She went on to receive a Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry at Purdue University under the direction of Richard A. Walton. She went on to do a postdoctoral stint at Texas A&M University with the late, renowned chemist F.A. Cotton before accepting a position as an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing, MI where she quickly rose through the ranks to Distinguished Professor. She is a currently a University Distinguished Professor and the Davidson Professor of Science in the Chemistry Department at Texas A&M University. Dr. Dunbar has been recognized with numerous awards for teaching and research over the years. At Michigan State University (MSU) she won the leading Teaching Award (1990) for freshman chemistry and received a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (1991-1995), an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (1992-1995), a Sigma Xi Research Award (1998), a Distinguished Faculty Award from MSU (1998). She was the recipient of a Distinguished Alumni Award from Westminster College (2000), and a Purdue University Distinguished Alumna Award (2004). She received two National Science Foundation Creativity Extension Awards (1995; 2002) and is a Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science, (2004), the American Chemical Society (2011) and the Royal Society of Chemistry (2017).  While on faculty development leave in 2011, she was named a Wilsmore Fellow and Visiting Professor, University of Melbourne, Australia and a Visiting Professor at the Institut Le Bel, Iniversité de Strasbourg, France.