Ian Tonks promoted to Associate Professor
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (05/13/2019)—The University of Minnesota Board of Regents approved, Thursday, May 9, the promotion of Ian Tonks from assistant professor to associate professor with tenure. The promotion is effective, Monday, July 1, 2019.
Tonks has been a professor in the Department of Chemistry since 2013. Research in his group is focused on designing new, sustainable, and environmentally friendly chemical reactions through catalysis. Resource scarcity and environmental pollution are two of our most significant modern societal challenges, and developing new chemical processes that utilize renewable chemical feedstocks and environmentally benign reagents is of paramount importance to overcoming them. His approach is broadly split into two areas: (1) creating new organometallic catalysts based on earth-abundant and nontoxic metals such as titanium; and (2) designing reactions that use renewable and sustainable feedstocks such as biomass (e.g. corn, switchgrass, carbon dioxide). Organometallic chemistry is an interdisciplinary subfield that uses the principles of inorganic chemistry (structure and bonding of metal complexes) to address questions in organic chemistry (how metals interact with carbon-based molecules). Expertise in organometallic catalysis enables us to attack a broad range of problems including pharmaceutical synthesis, polymerization catalysis, and chemical feedstock access. With his active research group, Tonks has been an adviser and mentor to 7 post-doctoral researchers, 17 graduate students, 19 undergraduates students, and 1 high school student.
In addition to research, Professor Tonks has been active in promoting safety, which is a core value of our department. As a member of the department's Safety Committee, he has worked to develop a faculty peer review of standard operating procedures, coauthored several high-profile editorials and presentations on chemical safety, and helped to develop The Safety Net, a website dedicated to safety in inorganic/organometallic chemistry.
Professor Tonks has also been committed to outreach through teaching. In the college, he has volunteered to teach CSE 1001: The First Year Experience, and also led a Freshman Global Seminar to France to learn about energy research and policies in Europe. Additionally, he was recently selected as a Land O’ Lakes Global Food Challenge University Ambassador, where he will advise undergraduates from around the country on issues related to food security, and participate in an on-site experience in Tanzania and South Africa.
Tonks earned his bachelor's degree from Columbia University, and his doctorate at the California Institute of Technology. Before coming to the University of Minnesota, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has received a number of awards, including Department of Energy Early Career Research Program award, American Chemical Society (ACS) Organometallics Distinguished Author Award, University of Minnesota McKnight Land-Grant Professorship, Thieme Chemistry journals award, ACS Organic Division Academic Young Investigator Award, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, and National Institutes of Health Outstanding Investigator Award.