UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — W. Niel Brandt, holder of the Eberly Family Chair in Astronomy and Astrophysics and professor of physics at Penn State, has been named an Evan Pugh Professor, the highest honor that Penn State bestows on a faculty member. Brandt is one of five Penn State faculty to be so named in 2026.
The professorships are named for Penn State’s founding president, Evan Pugh, a renowned chemist and scholar who was at the helm of the University from 1859 to 1864.
The Evan Pugh University Professorships are awarded to faculty members who are nationally or internationally recognized leaders in their fields of research or creative activity; demonstrate significant leadership in raising the standards of the University with respect to teaching, research or creativity, and service; display excellent teaching skills with undergraduate and graduate students who go on to achieve distinction in their fields; and receive support from colleagues who also are leaders in their disciplines.
“Niel is a world-leading expert in high-energy astrophysics and cosmic surveys, whose more than 800 published academic papers have more than 80,000 collective citations,” said Randall McEntaffer, head of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State. “He is a dedicated mentor, and his numerous graduate and undergraduate students and postdoctoral researchers have gone one to lead successful scientific careers. He is also positively reviewed by the students he teaches and has impacted countless K-12 students through his leadership at workshops for middle- and high-school astronomy teachers for the past 25 years. In light of his influential research, committed mentorship, innovative outreach and dedicated service, being named an Evan Pugh professor is a fitting honor.”
Brandt is an astrophysicist who uses data from sensitive X-ray and multi-wavelength observatories to study cosmic phenomena, including supermassive black holes and how they feed, grow and affect the galaxies in which they reside. His research group works toward creating the most sensitive cosmic X-ray surveys to date using the world’s most advanced X-ray observatories. These surveys have revealed many thousands of active galaxies — galaxies with a central core that emits luminous radiation — that were missed in surveys at other wavelengths. When matched with essential multi-wavelength complementary surveys, these X-ray surveys have revealed information about the physical processes and interactions of active galactic nuclei with their host galaxies.
Because of the extreme sensitivity of the surveys, Brandt’s lab has been able to detect X-rays whose origins date back to close to the beginning of the universe — reaching back across 90% of cosmic history. Brandt’s group has also led intensive X-ray observations of very distant examples of the most-luminous active galaxies, quasars, aiming to study the growth of the first supermassive black holes that formed in the universe. Their research helped to reveal that the basic X-ray properties of these distant objects generally appear remarkably similar to those of the quasars that are closer to the Milky Way.
Brandt has also studied the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, galaxies with highly elevated star-formation rates, and binary star systems containing a black hole or neutron star.
Brandt is a member of the Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics for the National Academy of Sciences, where he contributes to key decision-making in the field of astronomy. He is a co-chair of the Active Galactic Nuclei Science Collaboration and a member of the Science Advisory Committee for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Rubin will use the largest camera ever built to conduct the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which will be an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of the universe. He has also been a long-term member or leader of several international, multi-institution collaborations, including the Chandra Deep Fields, the XMM Spitzer Extragalactic Representative Volume Survey (XMM-SERVS) and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Brandt is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Astronomical Society.
Brandt has also served as a lead instructor for the Penn State Inservice Workshops in Astronomy (PSIWA) since 2000. These week-long professional development workshops provide resources to high-school and middle-school teachers from Pennsylvania and its neighboring states to improve their confidence in teaching astronomy concepts in their own classrooms.
Brandt’s previous honors include the Bruno Rossi Prize of the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society in 2016, the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize in Astronomy from the American Astronomical Society in 2004, a U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2000, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 1999 and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship in 1996.
He was honored by Penn State in 2010 with the title of Distinguished Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and in 2014 with the title of Verne M. Willaman Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics. In 2023, he was named the Holder of the Eberly Family Chair in Astronomy and Astrophysics, one of the highest honors awarded to faculty members in the Penn State Eberly College of Science.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State in 1997, Brandt was a Smithsonian Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics from 1996 to 1997. He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics at the California Institute of Technology in 1992 and a doctoral degree in astronomy at Cambridge University in 1996.