Donald Geesaman retired from Argonne National Laboratory in 2017 where he was a Distinguished Argonne Fellow and a former Director of the Physics Division.

He received his B.S. (1971) from the Colorado School of Mines and M.A. and Ph.D. (1976) from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. After his Ph.D., he joined Argonne National Laboratory and was promoted to Senior Physicist in 1991 and Distinguished Argonne Fellow in 2008. He is currently an Argonne Associate of Value Added Solutions Inc. 

Dr. Geesaman is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association of the Advancement of Science. He received a DOE Office of Science Appreciation Award and an APS Division of Nuclear Physics Service Award. He was elected the Chair of the Division of Nuclear Physics of the APS for 2004-2005. He has served on the Board of the Directors of users group at M.I.T. Bates, LAMPF, and JLab, program advisory committees at IUCF, M.I.T. Bates, JLab, BNL, and GSI, and has been the chair of the Board of Directors of the Jefferson Lab Users Group and chair of the Jefferson Lab Program Advisory Committee.

Dr. Geesaman was the chair of the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee (NSAC) from 2012-2016 and led the 2015 Long Range Plan for Nuclear Science, ​“Reaching for the Horizon.” He previously served on NSAC, numerous NSAC subcommittees, and Long-Range Plan working groups (including co-chair of the NSAC Isotopes Subcommittee that created a Long Range Plan for the Isotope Development and Production for Research and Applications program). He was a member of the OECD Global Science Forum Working Group for Nuclear Physics, the IUPAP C-12 Commission on Nuclear Physics, and the IUPAP Working Group on International Cooperation in Nuclear Physics. He was an Associate Editor of Physical Review C, and is currently an Editor of Physics Letters B.

Dr. Geesaman’s recent research focuses on understanding the implications of nucleon substructure in nuclear physics and on understanding the structure of nuclei. This includes measurements of deep inelastic muon scattering at FNAL, measurements of the anti-quark distributions of the proton in Drell-Yan experiments at FNAL, tests of color transparency in electroproduction experiments at FNAL, SLAC and Jefferson Lab, and several experiments at Jefferson Lab to examine the structure of the proton and its meson fields in the nuclear medium. The nuclear structure work includes electron scattering studies and planning for advanced rare isotope facilities.

He is the author of more than 100 scientific publications.