Koltun, Daniel S.

Biographical Sketch:

Prof. Koltun received his A.B. from Harvard (1955) and his Ph. D. in Physics from Princeton (1961). After serving as Instructor, then Research Associate, at Princeton, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel), before coming to the University of Rochester as a Research Associate 1962. He joined the faculty as Assistant Professor of Physics in 1963, was promoted to Associate Professor in 1968 and to Professor in 1974. He became Professor Emeritus in 2004.

Professor Koltun served as Visiting Research Associate (1969-70) and Visiting Scientist (1984) at MIT, Visiting Professor at Tel Aviv University (1976-7), and Lady Davis Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem (1985). He has been awarded an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Professor Koltun is coauthor, with the late Judah M. Eisenberg, of the books Theory of Meson Interactions with Nuclei (1980) and Quantum Mechanics of Many Degrees of Freedom (1988). He has served as Associate Editor of Physical Review C and of Physical Review Letters, and on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Space Radiation Effects Laboratory (Newport News).

Long associated with the scientific program of the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility (LAMPF), he was a Visiting Staff Member for 18 years, and served on its Program Advisory Committee.

Research: Prof. Koltun's research interests and activities have been in theoretical physics, largely connected with nuclear structure and reactions at intermediate and high energy, and with many body theory. The experimental data for this subject has come from meson 'factories' such as LAMPF, TRIUMF and SIN (PSI), electron accelerators such as SLAC, BATES, and more recently CEBAF (T Jefferson NL). The theoretical motivation has been to understand the dynamics of nuclei as many-body systems, and the role of subnucleon constituents in this problem. The constituents of special study have been mesons, particularly pions, and more recently, quarks. Recent work has included the connection of inelastic response of nuclei to nuclear structure and mesonic interactions, the study of one-dimensional integrable many-body models for quark systems, and to model other physical systems, and applications of chiral perturbation theory.