Kim Renee Dunbar

About Me

Professor Kim Renee 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 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.

In 2012 she received an Honorary Degree from her alma mater Westminster College and delivered the commencement address in the May 2012 graduation ceremonies. She received the top Award for Research in the field of Inorganic Chemistry, The Distinguished Service Award for the Advancement of Inorganic Chemistry in 2015 which was presented to her in Boulder, Colorado. She is only the second woman to receive this high honor. In 2018 the Chicago Section of the American Chemical Society and Northwestern University announced that Kim Dunbar will receive the Fred Basolo Medal For Outstanding Research in Inorganic Chemistry. The Medal will be given at a seminar and ceremony to be held in Evanston, Il in October 2019.

Professor Dunbar has been featured along with other prominent women scientists including Marie Curie in an Editorial in Angewandte Chemie on Women in Chemistry (2011). At Texas A&M University she is the first woman in the College of Science to be named a Chaired Professor. Dunbar's research in synthetic and structural inorganic chemistry is focused on the use of coordination chemistry to establish structure/bonding/properties relationships in molecular materials and in metal-based drugs. She is the author of over 360 publications (18 reviews or book chapters) with an h-index of 67. Her experimental and theoretical work to understand physical and chemical phenomena have redirected and focused the work of other researchers in her field. She served as an Associate Editor for the leading journal in her field, Inorganic Chemistry for 12 years."