Jainendra Jain receives 2026 Honorary Alumni Award
Three longtime Penn State champions and benefactors, including Jainendra K. Jain, Evan Pugh University Professor, Eberly Family Chair in Physics, and director of the Penn State Center for Theory of Emergent Quantum Matter, were recognized by the Penn State Alumni Association with the 2026 Honorary Alumni Award at a celebratory event on Friday, June 12, at the Hintz Family Alumni Center.
Since 1973, the Alumni Association has presented the award to honor people who, while not graduates of Penn State, have made significant contributions to the University’s welfare, reputation or prestige. Since the Honorary Alumni Award was established, more than 100 individuals have been given honorary alumni status.
Jain is a theoretical physicist with interests in the area of strongly interacting electronic systems in low dimensions. He is best known for predicting a new class of particles that he named composite fermions, and for explaining the phenomenon of the fractional quantum Hall effect as the integral quantum Hall effect of composite fermions. In 2025 he was awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics, one of the highest honors in the world of science. In 2026 he was selected as the founding director of the Lodha Theoretical Physics Institute, established by the Lodha Foundation, a leading philanthropic organization in India.
Jain was elected a foreign fellow of the Indian National Science Academy in 2024, appointed as the holder of the Eberly Family Chair in Physics in 2023, elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2021, named an Evan Pugh University Professor in 2012, honored with the Distinguished Alumnus Award by the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 2010, elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008, and received the Oliver E. Buckley Prize from the American Physical Society in 2002.
Prior to joining the Penn State physics faculty in 1998, Jain was a professor of physics at Stony Brook University. Prior to that he was a postdoctoral scholar at Yale University and the University of Maryland. Jain earned his doctoral degree from Stony Brook University in 1985 after earning a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in physics in India.
Visit the Alumni Association’s Honorary Alumni page for more information about the recipients’ accomplishments and contributions to Penn State.