Grant Bunker

Grant B. Bunker, Ph.D. is Professor of Physics at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, IL. He has worked in the area of X-ray Absorption Fine Structure Spectroscopy (XAFS) and Synchrotron Radiation Research since1977, with emphasis on improved and novel methods for experiment and data analysis, and XAFS education, with applications to biology, chemistry, and physics. His most recent book (2024) is "The Phase Method". Some of his other intellectual interests are complex systems, pattern formation, origins of life, data analysis and modeling, visualization, and advanced computation. Bunker obtained his Ph.D. with Prof. Edward Stern at the University of Washington (Seattle WA) in 1984, and his BA in physics and biology in 1976 at The Evergreen State College in Olympia WA. After a one year postdoc at Penn with Prof. Britton Chance, he served as Associate Director (with B.C.) of the Biostructures Institute in Philadelphia, and also as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1991 he was recruited to IIT, and from then until 2001 served as the founding Director of the Biophysics Collaborative Access Team (BioCAT), which constructed and still operates the sector 18 beamline and facilities at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory, under NIH Research Resource funding. He has co-organized and taught numerous summer schools on XAFS. Most recently he served a fourteen year stint as Physics Department Chair and Associate Dean at IIT. In his spare time he also is "President" of Quercus X-ray Technologies LLC, of Oak Park, IL, a garage business that designs and manufactures (for resale) novel instrumentation for x-ray research. His sadly neglected personal interests are music, film, reading, cooking, sailing, biking, and hiking. He is married, with three adult children. GB's older brother, Bruce Bunker, Emeritus Professor of Physics at U. Notre Dame, also worked in XAFS, a fine source of confusion!