Dr. Timothy J. Bunning, Chief Technology Officer for Air Force Research Laboratory will give a seminar titled "My 'Day Job' and My 'Weekend Job'" to all interested faculty and students at Discovery Park.

Abstract

The DOD research laboratories are mission-driven entities combining competency-based scientists and engineers (‘practitioners’) immersed in a mission-centric, application-rich (capability) environment. The seminar will consist of three separate parts; an overview of the Air Force Research Laboratory in the macro, an overview of one of the components, AFRL’s Materials and Manufacturing Directorate, where basic and applied research is conducted on all materials classes for a variety of applications, and third, a quick overview of an active research topic I am still connected with. For the second part, current foci and a look into where the future materials needs are will be quickly presented. The latter part will examine liquid crystal/polymer systems being developed for a variety of static and dynamic photonic applications.  Recent advances in patterning the director field across the in-plane direction and the development of new materials (novel reactive mesogenic materials and photosensitive molecules) has enabled a new breed of dynamic photonic elements based on passive and dynamic cycloidal diffractive waveplates.

Biography

Dr. Timothy J. Bunning, ST  is the Chief Technology Officer for the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), responsible for assisting with the planning and execution of an annual $3 billion Air Force science and technology program and considerable resources executed on behalf of a variety of customers. He serves 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 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 350 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 and is on the editorial boards of several materials-centric journals.