J. A. Panitz is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of New Mexico. John joined UNM in 1988 from Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque. During his sixteen year tenure he was Professor of Physics, Professor of High Technology Materials and Professor of Cell Biology in the School of Medicine. At UNM he developed Visual E&M. It was the first undergraduate laboratory that encouraged critical thinking and role playing in the structured environment of cooperative learning groups and received the first NSF grant (DUE-9952274) for undergraduate education at UNM.

In 1993 he founded High-Field Consultants to provide expertise and training in high-field phenomena at the atomic level. During 1970 to 1988 he was a senior member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque where he invented the Field Desorption Spectrometer and a unique immunochemical sensor that he called the LiFE Detector. In 1967 Erwin Wilhelm Müller and J. A. Panitz introduced the Atom-Probe Field Ion Microscope. Its successor, the 10cm Atom Probe became the progenitor of Atom Probe Tomography in widespread use today.