Senior Vice Provost for Research Dawn Bonnell, who also serves as the Henry Robinson Towne Professor in Materials Science and Engineering, has been elected to the American Philosophical Society.

At Penn, Dr. Bonnell forges paths that allow Penn engineers to strategically plan and execute pioneering research. Dr. Bonnell plays an important role in developing strategies that anticipate future directions in scientific innovation, feeding the ongoing, thriving research enterprise and providing the underlying structures and programs that enable frontier research at Penn. She has also conducted extensive research across materials science, chemistry and physics.

The American Philosophical Society is the oldest learned society in the United States, founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin for the purpose of “promoting useful knowledge.” Today, the society honors leading scholars, scientists and professionals through elected membership and supports research and discovery through grants and fellowships, lectures, publications, prizes, exhibitions and public education. Dr. Bonnell was welcomed as a member of the society in May 2024.

“It is a great honor to be associated with such distinguished intellectuals, in history and present day,” said Dr. Bonnell. “I am looking forward to meeting colleagues and learning from their ideas and perspectives on topics way beyond my area of research. I am particularly excited to bring the insight I gain from collaboration and interaction with the American Philosophical Society back to the community at Penn.”

Earlier in Dr. Bonnell’s career, she volunteered in professional organizations, including serving as president of one that taught her how to lead groups with diverse goals. She has also served on several federal agency strategy committees, which provided her with insight into trending research directions and how to approach their funding. These experiences enabled Dr. Bonnell to help establish the NanoBio Interface Center at Penn in 2004, and led to her position as Senior Vice Provost for Research at Penn.

“As Senior Vice Provost for Research, I have enjoyed creating programs and partnerships that advance research and enable faculty, graduate students and postdocs to explore new frontiers,” Dr. Bonnell said. “It has also been very rewarding to be able to provide, with partnerships in the schools, the infrastructure required for frontier research and new system technologies that drive our functions.”

Dr. Bonnell supports the research endeavors of the greater Penn community, informed by her own roots as a researcher on nanotechnology tools used to measure and image atoms at surfaces and interfaces. Her work studies how to understand the behavior of atoms to manipulate properties that implicate a wide range of future devices, including biomedical sensors, solar cells, computer chips, next-generation batteries, memory storage, and energy harvesting and storage.

“My research has been in fundamental science,” said Dr. Bonnell. “We uncover new knowledge, and it is exciting to be in a position where you know something new that no one else knows, albeit for only a little while. It is then very gratifying to see others build on that knowledge to advance their research.”

Through Dr. Bonnell’s many roles at Penn, her passion lies in helping others succeed.

“One of the most satisfying components of research is seeing and helping students and postdocs become researchers,” she said. “To watch them develop skills and knowledge and then see the excitement when they make their first discovery or solve a problem is what I look forward to the most.”