The Department of Physics and Astronomy is excited to share that two alumni, Jen-Chieh Peng (Ph.D '75) and Anna Quider (B.S. '07), have been presented with the department's 2026 Distinguished Alumni Awards!
Peng and Quider were invited back to Pitt for a weekend of celebratory events, centered around Homecoming weekend. Among the weekend's many events, Peng and Quider both had the opportunity to meet with faculty and current students, tour lab facilities, and give presentations on how their careers and lives have developed since they graduated from Pitt. Peng and Quider then joined Dean Adam Leibovich for a Homecoming reception, and on Saturday, attended a departmental awards dinner in which they were presented with their Distinguished Alumni Awards.
Photo 1: (From left) Physics & Astronomy Chair Andrew Zentner, Jen-Chieh Peng, Anna Quider, and Dean Adam Liebovich.
Photo 2: Anna Quider at the Allegheny Observatory, along with her daughter Elaine and husband Brian Gullege.
Photo 3: Jen-Chieh Peng presenting his lecture to students, faculty, and staff from the Department of Physics and Astronomy.
About the 2026 Distinguished Alumni
Anna Quider (BS '07), after earning her PhD at the University of Cambridge, is now the Assistant Vice President at Northern Illinois University. She is an astrophysicist who acts as both a speaker and writer on research, science policy, and astronomy for conferences, educational institutions, the Smithsonian Institute, the U.S. Embassy, and more. In her Distinguished Alumni talk, she reflected on her career as a congressional staffer, science diplomat, lobbyist, and entrepreneur - which aspects of her physics training proved most useful across these very different roles, what she has learned about how people and bureaucracies actually make decisions, and how to shape those decisions. She discussed what physicists can learn from problems where the boundary conditions are political, institutional, and human, and why learning and engaging broadly may be essential to addressing them. She invited the audience to reflect upon the problems that being a physicist equips them to see, and the parts of themselves beyond physics that may equip them to address those problems.
Jen-Chieh Peng (Ph.D. '75) came to Pitt in 1971 as a graduate student of Prof. James Maher studying experimental nuclear physics. Following a two-year postdoc position in France, he spent 23 years as a researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He then took a faculty position at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2002. In his talk, dedicated to the late Prof. Maher, he shared memories from his years as a student at Pitt, and as a researcher and teacher in physics over the past 55 years.