Founder, Continuum · President, UCLA Chapter

Sherry Peng

Sherry is a junior physics major at UCLA and is a transfer student from West Valley College and Mission College in the Bay Area. Her passion centers on physics outreach, academic programming, and the design of rigorous, large-scale initiatives that connect students to research, faculty, and the broader physics community.

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She previously served as Outreach Chair for Sigma Pi Sigma, UCLA’s Physics Honor Society, where she led external academic programming and authored the organization’s largest grant to date, supporting physics education and student engagement. Through this role, she developed experience in building student-centered, faculty-connected initiatives that operate beyond the internal walls of a single university. All of this work was undertaken during her first quarter at UCLA, during which she was accepted to Sigma Pi Sigma, served on its board, and additionally founded and chaired the Academic Affairs Committee, which facilitated exam review sessions for all introductory physics courses.

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In February 2026, she organized the Physics Transfer Summit at Los Angeles Pierce College, a first-of-its-kind event that brought together 112 attendees from 35 institutions and 21 majors. The summit featured 15 speakers spanning fields from quantum gravity and gravitational-wave astrophysics to medical physics and neurophysics, with faculty from UCLA, USC, Caltech, LMU, and Pepperdine, as well as UCLA graduate students and successful physics transfers. The event was designed to expose community college and physics-adjacent students to the breadth of physics at a rigorous level while providing clear guidance on pathways to research, transfer, and academic careers.

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Alongside her outreach work, Sherry currently conducts medical physics research at UCLA in Catherine Meyer's Lab under the Department of Nuclear Medicine. Her current research focus is on error correction within PET/SPECT imaging. She has also previously conducted research at Stanford in biochemistry focused on ALDH2 and how flavorings in e-cigarettes inhibit acetaldehyde metabolism, where she published an abstract as a first author in The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics in March 2025 and presented her work at various poster sessions and oral symposiums, combining wet-lab research with broader questions at the intersection of public health and science communication.

She also placed 1st and received People’s Choice Award out of 7 finalists in the 2025 Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program (TRDRP) Symposium at Oakland Marriott City Center for best research scientific pitch for general audiences in 3 minutes. She was the only undergraduate finalist and presented on how flavorings in e-cigarettes represent stable, fundamental compounds that can be studied to stay ahead of industry-driven changes. Judges included esteemed mid-late career investigators from different universities in the U.S. The competition was judged on clarity, organization, delivery, relevance, intellectual significance, engagement, and accessibility to general audiences with no technical jargon. The People’s Choice Award was determined by votes from the audience. TRDRP is a grant program paid for by CA state tobacco taxes ran under University of California.

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Finally, Sherry has tutored all offered math and physics courses at West Valley College, where she developed a deep understanding of how effective education, particularly the use of analogies and physical intuition on fundamental topics, dramatically improves conceptual understanding, retention, and the ability to apply concepts in new contexts.

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Through Continuum, she aims to create programs that treat clarity of scientific communication as a marker of mastery, incentivizing intellectual rigor while expanding access to high-level physics across institutions and disciplines.