Thom H. Dunning, Jr., Ph.D, is a Battelle Fellow at the Northwest Institute for Advanced Computing, a joint venture of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of Washington. He is also a Distinguished Faculty Fellow in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Washington and a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Dunning is the former director of UIUC’s National Centre for Supercomputing Applications. As NCSA director, Dr. Dunning was responsible for the development and deployment of the cyberinfrastructure needed by the nation’s academic research and education community, including one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers—Blue Waters. Dr. Dunning was also the Distinguished Professor of Research Excellence in UIUC’s Department of Chemistry. Prior to joining UIUC, Dr. Dunning was the founding director of the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a professor in the chemistry and chemical engineering departments at the University of Tennessee. Before that, he was the vice president for supercomputing and networking for the University of North Carolina System and a professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Earlier, he served as Assistant Director for Scientific Simulation in the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy, where he created the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program. Previous positions included the director of PNNL’s Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, head of the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Group at Argonne National Laboratory, and staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory.