People Spotlights

Assistant Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences; Nickerson Scholar

Urmila Mahadev

Mahadev's broad theme of research is in cryptographic possibilities of quantum information, a topic of considerable interest in the field. She has built new quantum cryptographic primitives by adapting and extending techniques from modern classical cryptography and has pioneered two widely acclaimed fundamental breakthroughs: 1) Quantum homomorphic encryption (i.e., computing on encrypted data) and 2) Verifiable delegation of quantum computation. Mahadev plans to focus her future research efforts on exploring problems in the intersection of theoretical computer science and quantum computing.

Ruby Fu

Ruby Fu studies subsurface fluid mechanics and how they shape our natural and engineered environments. Her work is applied to a wide range of geoscience problems in energy, resources and geohazards. Her current interests include clathrate and ice formation in porous media, hydrology, geologic carbon sequestration, and volcanic/geothermal systems.

John Sader

John Sader joins EAS as a Research Professor of Aerospace and Applied Physics from the University of Melbourne, where he was Professor of Applied Mathematics. John’s research spans many fields, including fluid mechanics, colloid science, plasmonics, mass spectrometry and atomic force microscopy, and he collaborates broadly with experimentalists across the world. John is perhaps best known for developing experimental methods in atomic force microscopy. He has been a regular visitor to Caltech since 2009 and has collaborated with many groups across EAS on nanoelectromechanical systems for mass spectrometry, rarefied gas dynamics, fluid-structure interactions of flags, shape morphing mechanical structures, dynamic stability of thin elastic films for space deployment, and the vortex dynamics of start-up flows. John is an elected fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, the Australasian Fluid Mechanics Society, and the Australian Mathematical Society. His office is in the Firestone Laboratory.

Joseph Falson

Joseph Falson's research focuses on the synthesis and characterization of quantum materials that display emergent functionalities. The group specializes in the thin-film growth of high quality crystals and their physical evaluation in extreme environments, including at low temperature and high magnetic field.

Georgia Gkioxari

Georgia's research focuses on machine vision, namely teaching machines to see. Her work explores methods for learning from visual corpora to tackle challenging visual tasks with scalable, efficient and generalizable solutions. Georgia's research is centered around object recognition from images and videos as well as object tracking and 3D understanding.

Ivy Chen

I am a G2 in Applied Physics, working in Professor Austin Minnich’s group. Prior to my arrival at Caltech, I got my BS in Physics from Harvey Mudd College, where I worked on experimentally demonstrating a class of entangled states called one-way Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen steering. After my undergraduate studies, I worked as a software engineer at Google for two years before moving onto graduate school. While at Google, I worked on shopping ads relevance and safety across all search platforms. At Caltech, my research focuses on atomic layer etching (ALE), a novel subtractive nanofabrication technique that can achieve angstrom-level control over etching through self-limiting, sequential chemical modifications. I develop and characterize the chemical processes of ALE recipes for photonic materials like lithium niobate. In my free time, I enjoy running, playing video games, and trying all the new foods that Pasadena and LA have to offer.

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