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President & Executive Secretary · 2016–present
Nuclear physicist (B.S. and Ph.D., University of Notre Dame) and the Foundation’s third president, appointed in 2016. His career spans faculty and dean roles, Argonne National Laboratory, the Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation, with a career-long focus on undergraduate research. Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Council on Undergraduate Research, and a former CUR president.
John Mateja is an experimental nuclear physicist with research interests in light heavy-ion reactions. He earned his B.S. (1972) and Ph.D. (1976) from the University of Notre Dame and completed postdoctoral research at Florida State University.
Joining the physics faculty at Tennessee Technological University in 1978, Mateja built one of the nation’s early federally funded undergraduate research programs. He moved to Argonne National Laboratory in 1988 to oversee the laboratory’s college outreach programs, and in 1994 went to Department of Energy headquarters, where he helped establish the DOE EPSCoR program.
As Dean of the College of Science at Murray State University from 1998, he led the college to significant funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the National Science Foundation, and other sources, founded the university’s Undergraduate Research and Scholarly Activity Office, and directed its McNair Scholars Program. From 2008 to 2010 he served as a Program Officer in NSF’s Division of Undergraduate Education.
In 2016, Mateja was named the third President of the Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation. He is a Fellow of both the American Physical Society and the Council on Undergraduate Research, a former President of the Council on Undergraduate Research, and a former Chair of the American Physical Society’s Committee on Education.