News & Events

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

12-08-08

Ares Rosakis, Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering; Director, GALCIT, has been elected to the grade of Fellow in the Society of Experimental Mechanics. Designation as an SEM Fellow is reserved to a select group of individuals that have made notable contributions to the Society and to the field of Experimental Mechanics. The formal presentation of the 2009 Fellow Award will take place at the Awards Luncheon on Tuesday, June 2, during the SEM Annual Conference that is scheduled to be held June 1 - 3, 2009 in Albuquerque, NM.

Tags: honors GALCIT Ares Rosakis

12-08-08

Anne Campbell, Director Systems Engineering and Management at Caltech's Industrial Relations Center, has received recognition from Northrop Grumman Corporation for outstanding leadership, energy, and collaboration on providing innovative educational opportunities for the aerospace industry. The award was presented by Frank Flores, Vice President, Engineering and Programs, Northrop Grumman Integrated Systems on November 7, 2008.

12-08-08

The paper "Mapping Two-Way Grids on to Free-Form Surfaces" by Sergio Pellegrino, Professor of Aeronautics and Civil Engineering, and co-authors Pete Winslow and Shrikant Sharma has been selected as the winner of the IASS Tsuboi Award in the category of the most outstanding paper in the Proceedings of the 2007 IASS Symposium. Pellegrino has also received a best paper recognition for "Computation of Partially Inflated Shapes of Stratospheric Balloon Structures" with co-author Xiaowei Deng. This work has has been selected as the best paper by the ASME Aerospace Structures and Materials Technical Committee. The award will be presented at the 50th AIAA SDSM conference.

Tags: honors MCE Sergio Pellegrino

12-08-08

Michael Elowitz, Assistant Professor of Biology and Applied Physics and Bren Scholar, has received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers. The PECASE awards recognize outstanding scientists and engineers who, early in their careers, show exceptional potential for leadership at the frontiers of knowledge.

Tags: APhMS honors Michael Elowitz

12-01-08

Using an MRI technique, Morteza Gharib, Hans W. Liepmann Professor of Aeronautics and Professor of Bioengineering, and his colleague Abbas Nasiraei Moghaddam, a Caltech graduate and visitor in Bioengineering, were able to create some of the first dynamic images of normal heart muscle in action at the tissue level. They showed that a muscular band--which wraps around the inner chambers of the heart in a helix--is actually a sort of twisting highway along which each contraction of the heart travels. "We tagged and traced small tissue elements in the heart, and looked at them in space, so we could see how they moved when the heart contracts," Gharib explains. "In this way, we were able to see where the maximum physical contraction occurs in the heart and when--and to show that it follows this intriguing helical loop."

Tags: research highlights GALCIT MedE health Morteza Gharib