News & Events

04-20-10

William A. Goddard III, Charles and Mary Ferkel Professor of Chemistry, Materials Science, and Applied Physics, has been elected to 2010 American Academy of Arts and Sciences class of fellows. Professor Goddard joins an assembly that was founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock, and other scholars to provide practical solutions to pressing issues. [Caltech Today Article]

Tags: APhMS honors William Goddard AMACAD

04-15-10

Harry A. Atwater, Jr., Howard Hughes Professor and Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science, has been awarded the Fred Kavli Distinguished Lectureship in Nanoscience by the Materials Research Society. His lecture was entitled "Bending Light to Our Will: Nanophotonic Structures for Terawatt-Scale Solar Energy Conversion." [MRS Article]

Tags: APhMS honors energy Harry Atwater

04-09-10

Congratulations to Senior Leon Liu who has been named a Gates Cambridge Scholar. His option of study is Applied Physics and he is investigating strategies to decrease the cost of solar cells.

Tags: APhMS energy Leon Liu

04-09-10

Michelle Effros, Professor of Electrical Engineering, and colleagues have written an interesting piece in Scientific American on how wireless networks that do not depend on a fixed infrastructure will allow for ubiquitous connectivity. [Scientific American Article]

Tags: EE research highlights Michelle Effros

04-09-10

Chiara Daraio, Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Applied Physics, has won the 2010 Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award. The objectives of the Young Investigator Program are to attract to naval research outstanding new faculty members, to support their research, and to encourage their teaching and research careers. Professor Daraio's award is for her experimental study of nonlinear acoustic lenses with dynamically controllable focus. ONR announced 17 new awards in 2010. [View full list of Recipients]

Tags: APhMS honors Chiara Daraio GALCIT

04-02-10

Christof Koch, Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology and Professor of Computation and Neural Systems, Pietro Perona, Allen E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering, and colleagues' research on decision making and visual saliency has found that human decisions are influenced by both value and saliency in a way that is consistent with the ideal Bayesian observer. [Abstract]

Tags: EE research highlights Pietro Perona Christof Koch

03-26-10

Beverley McKeon, Assistant Professor of Aeronautics, shares her perspectives on controlling turbulence in the March 2010 issue of Science. Professor McKeon states, "more than 100 years after Osborne Reynolds's seminal experiments on the transition of flow through a pipe from a laminar to a turbulent state, the exact physical mechanism that drives this phenomenon still vexes the fluid mechanics community." [Science Magazine Article]

Tags: research highlights GALCIT Beverley McKeon

03-15-10

Joel Tropp, Assistant Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics, has been awarded the sixth Vasil A. Popov Prize. The Popov Prize recognizes distinguished research accomplishments in Approximation Theory and related areas of mathematics. It is awarded every third year and is restricted to young mathematicians removed less than 6 years from their doctoral degree.

Tags: honors CMS Joel Tropp

03-15-10

During a special visit, Caltech faculty and students discussed their research in metamaterials, autonomous systems, and artificial intelligence with Northrop Grumman Corporation guests Wes Bush, Chief Executive Officer and President, and Alexis Livanos, Corporate Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. The visitors also heard about the commercializing technologies of the Caltech Office of Technology Transfer and newly formed Center for Technology Management Education.

03-10-10

Congratulations to Robbie Paolini, Long Nguyen, and Paul Suffoletta of Team Up who won this year's ME 72 Contest which was held on Tuesday, March 9, 2010. Teams of three to four competed to deploy their airships and robots and navigate them through a course that involved releasing, gathering, and shooting ping-pong balls and passing through a hoop 15 feet above the ground. Team Up won by outlasting their peers through eight rollicking rounds. [Watch Fox 11 News story (27 seconds, QuickTime plugin required)] [View slide show] [Pasadena Star News article] [Caltech Press Release]

Tags: MCE