News & Events

02-25-09

Jehoshua "Shuki" Bruck, Caltech's Gordon and Betty Moore Professor of Computation and Neural Systems and Electrical Engineering, has won the Richard P. Feynman Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Caltech's most prestigious teaching honor, the prize was established in 1993 "to honor annually a professor who demonstrates, in the broadest sense, unusual ability, creativity, and innovation in undergraduate and graduate classroom or laboratory teaching." A member of the Caltech faculty since 1994, Bruck was the founding director of Information Science and Technology (IST) at Caltech. His research combines work on the design of distributed information systems and the theoretical study of biological circuits and systems. Kudos!

Tags: EE honors Jehoshua Bruck Feynman Prize for Excellence in Teaching

02-23-09

Christopher Brennen, Richard L. and Dorothy M. Hayman Professor of Mechanical Engineering, has been elected as a Fellow of the School of Engineering at The University of Tokyo in recognition of his contribution to the research and education of the school, as well as his outstanding accomplishments in research and education in the field of engineering.

Tags: honors MCE Christopher Brennen

02-17-09

Mechanical Engineering graduate student Roseanna Zia has won the overall best poster prize in the first campus-wide Graduate Student Poster Session sponsored by the Graduate Student Council (GSC). Her poster was titled "Single particle motion in colloids: force-induced diffusion." The other winner, Anthony Roy, also a graduate student in Mechanical Engineering, won in the interdisciplinary category with his poster titled "Genetic programming of an artificial neural network for robust control of a 2-D path following robot." Congratulations!

Tags: honors research highlights MCE

02-13-09

Carver Mead, Gordon and Betty Moore Professor of Engineering and Applied Science, Emeritus, and Caltech alumnus Gordon Moore, are among the fifteen 2009 inductees into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame. Mead helped to develop the standards and tools that permitted tens of thousands of transistors to be packaged on a single silicon chip, what is known as very large-scale integration (VLSI). Gordon Moore credits Mead with coining the term "Moore's Law" to describe the notion that the number of transistors that can be packaged on an integrated circuit will double every two years, and Mead performed the physics calculations to prove it. As a cofounder of both Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, Moore set the pace and standards for Silicon Valley's chip manufacturing methods. His work established the model of the computer industry researcher-entrepreneur and help make Intel a world-leading chip maker.

Tags: honors research highlights alumni Carver Mead

02-07-09

Ares Rosakis, Theodore von Karman Professor of Aeronautics and Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and Hiroo Kanamori, John E. and Hazel S. Smits Professor of Geophysics, Emeritus, with their students and colleagues will be featured in the documentary How the Earth Was Made airing on the History Channel on February 10, 6pm (PST) or 9:00pm (EST). The segment concerns the San Andreas fault and features a part which was filmed in the Solid Dynamics Lab at GALCIT. It also features an interview on supershear earthquake ruptures with Rosakis and Kanamori.

Tags: research highlights GALCIT MCE Ares Rosakis

01-16-09

Julie Kornfield, Professor of Chemical Engineering, is the featured speaker at Neurons on the Run: Brain, Brawn, and Algorithms, February 7, 2009. This event is part of the Caltech/MIT Enterprise Forum. Kornfield specializes in discovering chemical and mechanical changes that occur in biological material with the ultimate goal of using such understanding to develop methods that will delay, stop, or even reverse degenerative processes. This event is free to Caltech students.

Tags: Julie Kornfield

01-08-09

Pianist Julia Greer, Assistant Professor of Materials Science, and violinist Christopher Kovalchick, graduate students in Aeronautics, performed a program of works by Brahms, Beethoven, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev on Sunday, January 11, 2009 at 3:30 p.m. in Ramo Auditorium.

Tags: Julia Greer

01-08-09

For the third year in a row, Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine has ranked Caltech as the best value among private universities in the United States. According to an article in the February issue, "A tiny institution that has the highest percentage of incoming freshmen with 700-plus SAT scores on the Kiplinger 100, Caltech boasts one of the world's top programs in science and technology. Its three-to-one student-faculty ratio gives Caltech students serious face time with a faculty that includes five Nobel Prize winners." The Institute is also commended for its shift to mostly need-based financial aid by reducing the amount of merit aid it offers and replacing loans with grants for families earning $60,000 or less.

12-22-08

The editors of Nature have published a list of 22 of their favourite articles from 2008 - including Programming biomolecular self-assembly pathways by Niles Pierce, Associate Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Bioengineering, and colleagues, and Frequency-modulated nuclear localization bursts coordinate gene regulation by Michael Elowitz, Assistant Professor of Biology and Applied Physics and Bren Scholar, and colleagues. 

Tags: APhMS research highlights CMS Niles Pierce Michael Elowitz

12-19-08

Visiting scientist Douglas Hofmann (MS '06) and and colleagues, including William Johnson, Ruben F. and Donna Mettler Professor of Engineering and Applied Science, have created structural metallic-glass composites, based in titanium, that are lighter and less expensive than any the group had previously created, while still maintaining their toughness and ductility--the ability to be deformed without breaking. They are among the toughest engineering materials that currently exist. [Caltech Press Release]

Tags: APhMS research highlights William Johnson Douglas Hofmann