05-12-20
Changhuei Yang, Thomas G. Myers Professor of Electrical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Medical Engineering, has developed a technique that combines fluorescence and ultrasound to peer through opaque media, such as biological tissue. "We hope that one day this method can be deployed to extend the operating depth of fluorescence microscopy and help image fluorescent labeled cells deep inside living animals," says Yang. [Caltech story]
05-05-20
Graduate Students Laure Delisle, Eitan Levin, Yiheng Lin, Cameron Voloshin, and Zihui (Ray) Wu have been selected for the Kortschak Scholars Program. It was founded in 2017 with the objective of launching a new era of scholarship, inquiry, and innovation in Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech. The program provides multi-year fellowships to entering PhD students, allowing them to explore emerging areas in computing and mathematical sciences without being tied to grants and quarterly deliverables. [Current Scholars]
Tags: honors CMS Laure Delisle Yiheng Lin Zihui (Ray) Wu Cameron Voloshin Eitan Levin
05-04-20
A new camera developed by Lihong Wang, Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering, is capable of taking as many as 70 trillion frames per second. The camera technology, which Wang calls compressed ultrafast spectral photography (CUSP), combines a laser that emits extremely short pulses of laser light that last only one quadrillionth of a second (one femtosecond) with optics and a specialized type of camera. The technology could open up new avenues of research in fields that include fundamental physics, next-generation semiconductor miniaturization, and the life sciences. "We envision applications in a rich variety of extremely fast phenomena, such as ultrashort light propagation, wave propagation, nuclear fusion, photon transport in clouds and biological tissues, and fluorescent decay of biomolecules, among other things," Wang says. [Caltech story]
Tags: EE research highlights MedE Lihong Wang
04-29-20
Andrew M. Stuart, Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, has been named fellow of the Royal Society. He is among sixty-two inductees to the society this year. "This year's fellows and foreign members have helped shape the 21st century through their work at the cutting edge of fields from human genomics to climate science and machine learning," said Venki Ramakrishnan, president of the Royal Society. [Caltech story]
Tags: honors CMS Andrew Stuart
04-27-20
Professor John F. Brady, Chevron Professor of Chemical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of his distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Election to the National Academy of Sciences is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to scientists and engineers. [Caltech story]
Tags: honors MCE John Brady
04-24-20
Victoria J. Orphan, James Irvine Professor of Environmental Science and Geobiology and the director of the Center for Environmental Microbial Interactions (CEMI), has been honored as a new member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS). Orphan focuses on communities of microbial life involved in the cycling of elements such as sulfur, carbon, and nitrogen. She has spent decades studying the partnership of a species of bacteria and a species of archaea that live within deep-sea methane seeps in what is called a consortia, a kind of symbiotic aggregate of multiple species. [Caltech story]
Tags: honors ESE Victoria Orphan
04-23-20
One of the ways we experience the world around us is through our skin. From sensing temperature and pressure to pleasure or pain, the many nerve endings in our skin tell us a great deal. Our skin can also tell the outside world a great deal about us as well. Wei Gao, Assistant Professor of Medical Engineering has developed an electronic skin, or e-skin, that is applied directly on top of your real skin. "We want this system to be a platform," he says. "In addition to being a wearable biosensor, this can be a human–machine interface. The vital signs and molecular information collected using this platform could be used to design and optimize next-generation prosthetics." [Caltech story]
Tags: research highlights MedE Wei Gao
04-09-20
Caltech has joined dozens of universities around the globe in launching the International Universities Climate Alliance (IUCA). The alliance is a network of fourty universities in eighteen countries, each with different strengths in analyzing and addressing climate change. "The IUCA hopes to be a resource to governments and other stakeholders that provides an independent and respected international voice on matters related to climate science, impacts, mitigation, and adaptation," says Andrew Thompson, Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering. [Caltech story]
04-02-20
To Professor Joseph Falson, electrons are like exotic supercars and his lab wants to build the racetrack. In Falson's analogy, he likens that to driving the supercar down a cobblestone street that limits its speed. "Our job is not to make the supercar, it's just to make the highway," he says. The problem for those who seek to study superconductivity and eventually make practical use of it is that, so far, it has been realized only at ultracold temperatures no warmer than -70 degrees Celsius. "There is a very strong push to realize room-temperature superconductivity—it is one of the holy grails of science," Falson says, "because then you are going to employ these materials in motors or transmission lines, and the loss would be significantly less. It would revolutionize society." [Caltech story]
03-31-20
Professor Andrei Faraon and team have shown that atoms in optical cavities—tiny boxes for light—could be foundational to the creation of a quantum internet. They identified a rare-earth ytterbium ion in the center of a beam. The ytterbium ions are able to store information in their spin for 30 milliseconds. In this time, light could transmit information to travel across the continental United States. "It's a rare-earth ion that absorbs and emits photons in exactly the way we'd need to create a quantum network," says Faraon. "This could form the backbone technology for the quantum internet." [Caltech story]
Tags: APhMS EE research highlights Andrei Faraon Andrei Ruskuc Jake Rochman John Bartholomew Yan Qi Huan
