LVC physics professor earns national award for research with undergraduates

An associate professor of physics and co-chairman of chemistry and physics at Lebanon Valley College has been named the nation’s top faculty member for research with undergraduate students.

Dr. Daniel Pitonyak, has received the American Physical Society 2026 Prize for a Faculty Member for Research in an Undergraduate Institution, the college announced in a statement Thursday, Nov. 6. The prestigious award is presented “to honor a physicist whose research in an undergraduate setting has achieved wide recognition and contributed significantly to physics and who has contributed substantially to the professional development of undergraduate physics students,” the release explains.

Physics faculty from several thousand U.S. institutions are eligible for the highly competitive award, the release states. Previous winners represent leading colleges and universities including Smith College, the University of San Diego, Hamilton College, Penn State University, Bucknell University, Amherst College, and Colgate University.

“I’m incredibly honored to have received this award and to have been recognized by my fellow physicists for the research I’ve performed at LVC that has had a high impact on the field of physics and the professional development of our majors,” Pitonyak said in the release. “This award is a testament to the physics research culture we’ve built in our department and the highly talented students who have thrived in it.”

The APS Selection Committee – which includes Dr. Daniel Claes (University of Nebraska, Lincoln), Dr. Geraldine Cochran (Ohio State University), Dr. Carlton Pennypacker (University of California, Berkeley), and Dr. Brad Conrad (National Institute of Standards and Technology) – said Pitonyak received the prestigious honor “for excellent contributions to our understanding of the spin and multi-dimensional structure of hadrons, and for outstanding mentoring of undergraduate students by engaging them in high-impact research projects.”

LVC provost Dr. Michelle Maldonado acknowledged Dr. Pitonyak’s impact on his students through hands-on undergraduate research experience that makes them more competitive for industry jobs and graduate school applications in engineering and physics.

“Dr. Pitonyak exemplifies LVC’s tradition of involving undergraduate students in research, often co-authoring articles in prestigious academic journals, including ones with international collaborators,” Maldonado said in the release. “He has taken numerous students to attend, present, or co-present at national conferences.”

Pitonyak’s research and mentoring of undergraduate students is highlighted by two National Science Foundation grants and is internationally recognized, the release says. He joined a nearly $2 million Department of Energy grant as a senior member, collaborating with physicists from Brookhaven National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, UCLA, the University of California, Berkley, and external collaborators in Finland, France, Spain, Sweden, and China.

He has been an invited speaker at over 50 U.S. and international conferences, including in Cyprus, France, and Italy. In the U.S., Pitonyak has presented at conferences hosted by Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, Jefferson Lab in Virginia, UCLA, and the Institute for Nuclear Theory in Washington. He has published over 40 papers, several of which feature LVC undergraduates as co-authors, in his field of theoretical high-energy nuclear physics, specifically studying the three-dimensional internal structure of hadrons.

These peer-reviewed publications range from journals like Physical Review Letters and Physical Review D to Journal of High-Energy Physics and Physics Letters B. Pitonyak’s papers overall have accumulated over 4,000 citations.

“I find it extremely rewarding to guide and advise students along their career paths, many of whom continue to great successes in graduate school and beyond in various subfields of physics and engineering. I look forward to continuing to mentor and develop the next generation of scientists and to further our knowledge of the elementary structure of matter through my research,” Pitonyak said.

LVC president Dr. James MacLaren, a physicist himself, said in the release that he is “delighted that Dan was recognized by the APS as the Nation’s Top Faculty Member for Research with Undergraduates. This is a richly deserved award. It is especially noteworthy since he conducted student-faculty research as a Valley undergraduate, including with two of his current faculty colleagues.”

Pitonyak earned a B.S. degree in 2008 at Lebanon Valley College, where he majored in physics and mathematics. In 2013, he received his Ph.D. in physics at Temple University in Philadelphia. His thesis won the 2015 Dissertation Award from the American Physical Society Group on Hadronic Physics.

Pitonyak spent five years as a postdoctoral researcher at Brookhaven National Lab, Penn State University Berks, and Old Dominion University before joining the LVC faculty in 2018. In 2024, he was selected for LVC’s Thomas Rhys Vickroy Award for Excellence in Teaching, the College’s top honor for full-time faculty.