Faculty

Joyce and Kent Kresa Professor of Aerospace and Civil Engineering; Jet Propulsion Laboratory Senior Research Scientist; Co-Director, Space-Based Solar Power Project

Professor Pellegrino's research focuses on lightweight structures and particularly on problems involving packaging, deployment, shape control and stability.

Allen E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering

Professor Perona's research focusses on vision: how do we see and how can we build machines that see.

Professor Perona is currently interested visual recognition, more specifically visual categorization. He is studying how machines can learn to recognize frogs, cars, faces and trees with minimal human supervision, and how machines can learn from human experts. His project `Visipedia' has produced two smart device apps (iNaturalist and Merlin Bird ID) that anyone can use to recognize the species of plants and animals from a photograph.

In collaboration with Professors Anderson and Dickinson, professor Perona is building vision systems and statistical techniques for measuring actions and activities in fruit flies and mice. This enables geneticists and neuroethologists to investigate the relationship between genes, brains and behavior.

Professor Perona is also interested in studying how humans perform visual tasks, such as searching and recognizing image content. One of his recent projects studies how to harness the visual ability of thousands of people on the web.

Fred and Nancy Morris Professor of Biophysics, Biology, and Physics

Professor Phillips focuses on physical biology of the cell: models of transcription and active matter, physical genomes, and biophysical approaches to evolution.

Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Bioengineering

Engineering small conditional DNAs and RNAs for signal transduction in vitro, in situ, and in vivo; computational algorithms for the analysis and design of nucleic acid structures, devices, and systems; programmable molecular technologies for readout and regulation of the state of endogenous biological circuitry.

Robert H. Goddard Professor of Aeronautics

Several active research areas at present; (1) development of large-eddy simulation for high-Reynolds number wall-bounded turbulent flow, particularly bluff-body flows, (2) shock-driven flows in both fluids and solids, (3)  development of new numerical methods for the solution of the Boltzman equation.

John E. Goode, Jr., Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering; Otis Booth Leadership Chair, Division of Engineering and Applied Science

Professor Ravichandran's research focuses on deformation and failure of materials, dynamic behavior, wave propagation, micro/nano mechanics, composites, active materials, biomaterials and cell mechanics, and experimental mechanics.

Theodore von Karman Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering

Solid mechanics, dynamic mechanical properties, ballistic impact, hypervelocity impact of micrometeorites on spacecraft, dynamic fracture and fragmentation, adiabatic shear banding, mechanics of metallic glasses, mechanics of thin films, mechanics of geological materials, restoration of ancient stone monuments, earthquake fault mechanics, induced seismicity.

Frank J. Roshek Professor of Physics, Applied Physics, and Bioengineering

Professor Roukes's research focuses on nanobiotechnology, nanotechnology, nanoscale physics, nanoscale and molecular mechanics.

Bernard Neches Professor of Electrical Engineering, Applied Physics and Physics

Professor Scherer's group focuses on the application of microfabrication to integrated microsystems. Recently, his group has specialized on developing sensors and diagnostic tools that can be used for low-cost point-of-care disease detection as well as precision health monitoring.

Professor Scherer has pioneered microcavity lasers and filters, and now his group works on integration of microfluidic chips with electronic, photonic and magnetic sensors. His group has also developed silicon nanophotonics and surface plasmon enhanced light emitting diodes, and has perfected the fabrication and characterization of ultra-small structures by lithography and electron microscopy.

Presently, his group works on integration of microfluidic chips with electronic, photonic and magnetic sensors. His group has also developed silicon nanophotonics and surface plasmon enhanced light emitting diodes, and has perfected the fabrication and characterization of ultra-small structures by lithography and electron microscopy.

Theodore Y. Wu Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering; Jet Propulsion Laboratory Senior Research Scientist

Professor Schneider's research group studies atmospheric dynamics, both here on Earth and on other planets, on scales from clouds to the globe. To answer fundamental questions about atmospheric dynamics, such as what controls Earth's winds and precipitation patterns, the group analyzes observational data and performs systematic studies with numerical models, simulating flows ranging from the meter-scale motions in clouds to global circulations. Collaborating with other scientists, engineers, and applied mathematicians in the Climate Modeling Alliance, Professor Schneider's group also develops next-generation models for weather forecasting and climate prediction.

Shaler Arthur Hanisch Professor of Computer Science and Applied and Computational Mathematics

Professor Schröder is interested in the design of efficient and reliable algorithms for problems in computer graphics. These range from geometric modeling (effective methods to model the shape of objects) to animation (simulation of physical phenomena such as the deformation of cloth). His emphasis is on an area known as "Discrete Differential Geometry." Its goals are to rebuild the foundations of classical differential geometry in a discrete setting which makes it immediately useful for computation.

Professor of Computer Science

Algorithms and Communication Protocols; Combinatorics and Probability; Coding and Information Theory; Quantum Computation.

Professor of Applied Physics

Professor Schwab's current focus is the development of Josephson junctions for superfluid helium-4 with the goal to build quantum devices such as interferometers and quantum bits from this material.  What makes this now possible are the advances in 2d nanometerials with nanometer pores.

Louis E. Nohl Professor of Chemical Engineering

Professor Seinfeld focuses on atmospheric chemistry, secondary organic aerosol formation, and aerosol-cloud relationships in climate. His research group addresses these areas through laboratory chamber and flow tube experiments, large-scale atmospheric modeling, and aircraft measurements.

C. L. "Kelly" Johnson Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering; Allen V. C. Davis and Lenabelle Davis Leadership Chair, Student Affairs; Vice President for Student Affairs

Joe Shepherd's research  focuses on transient combustion, high-speed flow, fluid-structure interaction, industrial (including nuclear power) and aviation safety.  His explosion dynamics research group uses theory, numerical simulations and experiments in shock tubes, detonation tubes, flow reactors, and combustion vessels to study themal and spark ignition, flame and detonation propagation in a wide range of fuel-oxidizer systems relevant to propulsion and safety.  He works with Prof. Austin' hypesonic flow research group and Prof. Hornung on high-enthalpy flow analyses and experimentation in the GALCIT T5, HET and Ludweig tube facilities.

Space-Related Research

Chemical propulsion systems; explosion hazards in launch vehicles and spacecraft.

Medical Engineering-Related Research

Autoinjector dynamics, in-situ measurements, numerical simulation and modeling.

Professor of Computation and Neural Systems; Executive Officer for Computation and Neural Systems

Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences

Professor Stuart's research is focused on the development of mathematical and algorithmic frameworks for the seamless integration of models with data. He works in the Bayesian formulation of inverse problems, and in data assimilation for dynamical systems. Quantification of uncertainty plays a significant role in this work. Current applications of interest include a variety of problems in the geophysical sciences, and in graph-based learning.

Anna L. Rosen Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering; Andrew and Peggy Cherng Medical Engineering Leadership Chair; Executive Officer for Medical Engineering

Professor Tai’s research uses MEMS/NEMS technologies for medical applications. He has built the Caltech MEMS Laboratory (http://mems.caltech.edu), an 8,000-square-foot facility completely dedicated to medical devices. This facility has a clean-room (~3,000 sq. ft), CAD lab, a measurement/test/metrology lab, and a biological lab. It supports more than 20 researchers (graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, visiting scholars and industrial members) to develop innovative MEMS/NEMS and medical devices. Examples of MEMS/NEMS devices include micromotors, microphones, neural chips, micro relays, micro power generators, micro valves, micro pumps, etc. Over the past 15 years, Prof. Tai has launched a major research effort to apply all these technologies to medical devices. Research examples include HPLC-on-a-chip, blood-labs-on-a-chip, and micro drug delivery. More specifically, Tai’s group has had a major program for miniature or micro implants. To this end, Prof. Tai collaborates with many medical doctors and biologist (such as from USC, UCLA, and industries) to develop integrated implants for cortical, retinal and spinal applications. Micro implant devices included spinal neural stimulators, ECG implants, retinal prosthetic devices, intraocular lenses, etc. Tai's group is always looking for students, postdocs and researchers who love technology and enjoy building medical devices.

Professor of Applied Physics, Aeronautics, and Mechanical Engineering

The Laboratory of Interfacial and Small Scale Transport {LIS2T} in the Department of Applied Physics and Materials Science at the California Institute of Technology specializes in both fundamental analysis and engineering design of micro/nanoscale fluidic systems. Of particular interest are small scale systems  dominated by large surface forces due to patterned capillary, van der Waals, Maxwell, thermocapillary and Marangoni fields. Theoretical analysis, numerical simulations (both continuum and molecular scale) and experimentation are all used to develop fundamental physical insight as well as robust design principles for application driven projects. Group focus is on formation, propagation, stability, coupling and control of nonlinear wave phenomena at the micro/nanoscale which induces rapid transport of mass, momentum and heat at moving interfaces. Systems of current theoretical interest include cusp formation in thermally and electrically driven thin films for super anti-reflecting coatings and space micropropulsion devices; nanofluidic phenomena involving Kapitza thermal jumps, layering transitions and thermal rectification in nanoscale devices; spatio-temporal parametric resonance and array formations in thin polymeric films exposed to large thermocapillary and Maxwell patterned fields; Lyapunov, modal and transient growth stability analyses of non-normal systems at zero Reynolds number; capillary and field enhanced propellant management systems for space micropropulsion applications; and solution of inverse problems for 3D lithographic patterning of nanofilms. Systems of current experimental interest include non-contact lithography of 3D micro-optical structures by patterned external fields; Marangoni wave phenomena and fractal wavefronts in biophysical systems; influence of layering transitions on slip behavior in nanoscale films; and optical wave propagation in structured polymeric waveguides.

Steele Family Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics

Joel Tropp's work lies at the interface of applied mathematics, electrical engineering, computer science, and statistics. This research concerns the theoretical and computational aspects of data analysis, sparse modeling, randomized linear algebra, and random matrix theory.