After serving as a professor of practice in chemistry at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) for four years and offering outstanding contributions to his field, Peter J. Bonitatibus Jr. is now an associate professor.

Bonitatibus is best known for his work in the field of contrast media for diagnostic imaging, as he invented intravenous, nanoparticle-based agents for computed tomography (CT) that simultaneously feature blood-pool behavior with unprecedented total body clearance. Bonitatibus has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for developing these tantalum-based agents since 2013.

He has a passionate interest in exploratory materials research for applications in diverse technologies enabled by liquid-phase synthesis of inorganic nanoparticles, and the design, synthesis, and characterization of novel organometallics, inorganic compounds, and homogeneous catalysts.

In addition to the NIH, Bonitatibus is funded by the National Science Foundation and private industry. Bonitatibus is the director of the Single Crystal X-ray Diffraction Facility at the Center for Materials, Devices, and Integrated Systems (cMDIS) and serves on the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Committee at RPI. He also serves as academic editor for Contrast Media and Molecular Imaging, as well as a referee for several journals in both the American Chemical Society (ACS) and the Royal Society of Chemistry. Bonitatibus has held a position on the Executive Committee for the Eastern New York section of the ACS, as treasurer, since 2019. He has authored 47 technical publications, 16 United States patents (issued), and 41 technical presentations at national and local venues.

Previously, Bonitatibus spent 16 years as a senior scientist at GE Global Research where he was an NIH-funded principal investigator, as well as a project leader on multiple contracts with the Department of Energy. As a postdoctoral researcher, Bonitatibus spent two years at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the labs of Prof. R.R. Schrock (Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, 2005), where he focused on the design, synthesis, and discovery of living organometallic (cationic) olefin polymerization catalysts. He published a total of 16 journal articles with Prof. Schrock. Bonitatibus earned a Ph.D. with Honors in Chemistry from Boston College and a B.S. in Chemistry from Fairfield University.