The College of Arts, Sciences, and Business (CASB) at Missouri University of Science and Technology will honor Dr. Jerry L. Peacher, associate chair and professor of physics, who has shared five decades of teaching excellence with Missouri S&T.

CASB will host a reception in his honor 3-4 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 4, in the Carver-Turner Room of the Havener Center on the Missouri S&T campus, located at 1346 N. Bishop Ave. in Rolla. The event is open to the public, and the campus community is encouraged to attend.

“It is a genuine privilege to recognize the contributions that Dr. Peacher has made to this campus, and to appreciate how many students he has inspired and counseled over the years,” says Dr. Kate Drowne, interim vice provost and dean of the College of Arts, Sciences, and Business and professor of English and technical communication. “The impact of such a long-serving professor can’t be measured quantitatively, so I’m glad the community has this special opportunity to thank Dr. Peacher in person for his leadership and his service.”

Peacher has received many awards for faculty excellence while teaching generations of S&T students to understand the properties of general relativity, electricity and magnetism, engineering physics, and theoretical physics. He says his students have been a constant inspiration, and he wants to keep teaching as long as he’s able.

“The nice thing about S&T is that the quality of the students has stayed consistent since I began here,” says Peacher. “That’s why I keep teaching—it’s interesting. People who want to do physics are pretty good students and have to know a lot of math to succeed in physics.”

Peacher joined Missouri S&T in 1969 as assistant professor of physics from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was an assistant research physicist in the Space Sciences Laboratory. His research interests have focused on atomic and molecular collision theory, the topic of his postdoctoral work at the University of California, San Diego. Prior to that he worked as a physicist at the Naval Ordnance Test Station in China Lake, California, after earning his Ph.D. in physics at Indiana University.

“Dr. Peacher is an enormous asset for the physics department,” says Dr. Thomas Vojta, chair and professor of physics at S&T. “After 50 years, he truly knows the university inside and out. As associate chair, he makes sure that the physics department runs smoothly and efficiently.”