Professor Dunning received his B.S. in chemistry in 1965 from the University of Missouri–Rolla and his Ph.D. in chemistry/chemical physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1970. He was a post-doctoral fellow at both the California Institute of Technology and Battelle Memorial Institute. He took a position at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1973, first in the Laser Theory Group and then in the Physical Chemistry Group. Dr Dunning was appointed group leader of the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Group at Argonne National Laboratory in 1978. Beginning in 1989, Dr. Dunning held many positions at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, becoming director of the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory in 1994 and the first Battelle Fellow in 1997. Dr. Dunning spent two years (1999-2001) in the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy as Assistant Director for Scientific Simulation, where he was responsible for developing a new scientific computing program. Dr. Dunning then went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a professor of chemistry and was responsible for supercomputing and networking for the University of North Carolina System. In 2002, he was appointed director of the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences, Distinguished Professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at the University of Tennessee, and Distinguished Scientist in computing and computational sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Professor Dunning joined the University of Illinois faculty in January, 2005.