05-17-12
Harry A. Atwater, Jr., Howard Hughes Professor and Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science; as well as Director of the Resnick Sustainability Institute, and colleague Albert Polman of the Dutch Research Institute AMOLF have been awarded the ENI Award in Renewable and Nonconventional Energy for research on high-efficiency solar cells based on nanophotonic design.
Tags: Harry Atwater
05-10-12
Nadia Lapusta, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Geophysics, and colleagues have developed the first computer model of an earthquake-producing fault segment that reproduces, in a single physical framework, the available observations of both the fault's seismic (fast) and aseismic (slow) behavior. "Earthquake science is on the verge of building models that are based on the actual response of the rock materials as measured in the lab—models that can be tailored to reproduce a broad range of available observations for a given region," says Lapusta. "This implies we are getting closer to understanding the physical laws that govern how earthquakes nucleate, propagate, and arrest." [Caltech Press Release]
Tags: Nadia Lapusta
05-06-12
The MacCready family have made a generous gift for the processing and digitizing of the papers of Caltech alumnus, inventor and entrepreneur Paul B. MacCready (1925-2007). Paul B. MacCready pioneered alternative energy solutions through his company, AeroVironment. In the mid-1970s he began work on the celebrated human-powered Gossamer aircraft series, beginning with the Gossamer Condor. He continued to work on the problems of solar-powered flight and unmanned aircraft, but his interest in environmentally friendly technology also led him to innovative electric and hybrid automotive vehicles, micro-air vehicles and the high altitude, long endurance Helios solar aircraft for telecommunications, imaging and scientific research.
The MacCready digitization project will be the first on the part of the Caltech Archives to make an entire paper, artifact, image and analog media collection available on the internet to the widest possible public. [Archives News]
Tags: Paul MacCready alumni
05-04-12
By analyzing stalagmites, Jess F. Adkins, Professor of Geochemistry and Global Environmental Science, and colleagues have determined that the climate signature in the tropics through four glacial cycles looks different in some ways and similar in others when compared to the climate signature at high latitudes. The results suggest that Earth's climate system might have two modes of responding to significant changes. [Caltech Press Release]
Tags: Jess F. Adkins
05-02-12
Katrina Ligett, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Economics, discusses what it is like to build a research program from scratch in "From the Ground Up," an article in the Spring 2012 issue of Caltech's "Engineering & Science" magazine.
Tags: Katrina Ligett
04-25-12
Mechanical Engineering undergraduate student, Eric Chang, has been named a Watson Fellow. The fellowship enables graduating seniors to spend a year traveling around the world, exploring and learning about topics of their choice. Chang will spend about three months each in Taiwan, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Hyderabad, India. In Asia, more and more people are moving from rural areas to the cities, and these cities must be able to build the infrastructure to handle the new population. "I wanted to see how these problems are being approached in these countries," he says. "These issues are going to have a large impact on the world." [Caltech Feature]
Tags: Eric Chang
04-25-12
John F. Hall, Professor of Civil Engineering, has been inducted into the Civil Engineering Academy of West Virginia University (WVU). This academy recognizes WVU alumni who have had distinguished professional careers.
Tags: John Hall
04-13-12
Pietro Perona, Allen E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering, and colleagues including graduate student, Peter Welinder, have been selected for the Innovation Corps (i-Corps) program of the National Science Foundation (NSF). The aim of the i-Corps program, which was highlighted by the NSF Director at a recent Wouk Lecture, is to guide promising research with commercial potential out of university laboratories. The winning Caltech proposal is entitled "Combining Machine Vision and Crowdsourcing for Convenient and Accurate Image Annotation." The team has proposed to combine the complementary strengths of human annotators and machines into a hybrid system that would annotate a large body of images which would be a valuable in scientific, medical, as well as many commercial applications. [Video of Wouk Lecture]
Tags: Pietro Perona Peter Welinder
04-04-12
Hardy C. Martel, Professor of Electrical Engineering, emeritus, passed away on March 29 at his home in Altadena. He was 85. "He was one of the first at Caltech to do research on information science and communications technology," says Roy Gould, the Simon Ramo Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, a lifelong friend and colleague of Martel. "His strength was in his basic, intuitive grasp of ideas and how things worked." [Caltech Feature] [E&S Article in pdf]
Tags: Hardy Martel Roy Gould
03-23-12
Jeff Snyder, Faculty Associate in Applied Physics and Materials Science, and colleagues have identified a liquid-like compound whose properties give it the potential to be even more efficient than traditional thermoelectrics. [Caltech Press Release]
Tags: Jeff Snyder
