Caltech is small but prizes excellence and ambition. The Institute's extraordinary faculty, students, postdoctoral scholars, and staff are expanding our understanding of the universe, shifting paradigms, launching new fields, and inventing the technologies of the future. They are producing transformative breakthroughs in fields ranging from quantum science and engineering to bioinformatics and the nature of life itself, from human behavior and economics to energy and sustainability.
Caltech is home to more than 50 research centers and institutes. Some 90 percent of Caltech undergraduates participate in research during their time here.
Maegan Tucker moves people. As a first-year graduate student in mechanical engineering at Caltech, she developed an accessory for walking canes that vibrates to alert users when they may be in danger of falling. She researches ankle exoskeletons that could help people with ambulatory impairments walk farther with less effort, and full-body suits that could return mobility to those who have lost it.
Most days, Caltech physics professor Rana Adhikari shoots lasers at mirrors, crystals, and film-coated glasses to see how photons of light interact with them. What he learns helps him design optical systems and sensors for LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, and its successors.
Caltech professor of biology Lea Goentoro and her students will try to persuade the moon jellyfish, an organism not known to regenerate in the wild, to regrow appendages.
Garnet Chan appreciates a good challenge. A Caltech theorist who works at the interface of theoretical chemistry, condensed matter physics, and quantum information theory, Chan says he is drawn to scientific problems that have long resisted theoretical study.
The Cat's Paw Nebula, imaged here by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope using the MIPS and IRAC instruments, is a star-forming region that lies inside the Milky Way galaxy. New stars may heat up the surrounding gas, which can expand to form "bubbles."
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
A scale model of the Autonomous Flying Ambulance on display at the new CAST facility.
Credit: Caltech
Closeup of the photoacoustic microscope, which provides label-free multilayered histologic images of human breast cancer.
Credit: Caltech
Oxyphotobacteria in microbial mats in Yellowstone.
Credit: Fischer Laboratory/Caltech
Scientists at JCAP create new materials by spraying combinations of elements onto thin plates.
Credit: Caltech
This illustration shows a red dwarf star orbited by a hypothetical exoplanet.
Credit: NASA/ESA/G. Bacon (STScI)
MEMOIR enables the histories of cells to be recorded in their genomes and then read out using microscopy. Here, MEMOIR cells were variably activated, as seen by the bright cyan nuclear fluorescence in some cells. The cells recorded information in response to this signal with the help of a DNA-editing system called CRISPR. This recorded information was then read out using a technique called seqFISH to visualize certain RNA transcripts in the cells (red dots).
Credit: Elowitz and Cai Labs/Caltech
Artist's representation of a conceptual design for the color detector, which uses thermoelectric structures with with arrays of nanoscale wires that absorb different wavelengths of light based on their width.
Credit: Harry Atwater and Kelly Mauser/Caltech
This illustration shows the seven Earth-size planets of TRAPPIST-1, an exoplanet system about 40 light-years away, based on data current as of February 2018. The image shows the planets' relative sizes but does not represent their orbits to scale. The art highlights possibilities for how the surfaces of these intriguing worlds might look based on their newly calculated properties.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt, T. Pyle (IPAC)
A torus of plasma, viewed from above. The ring is created by a jet of water striking a crystal plate.
Credit: Mory Gharib/Caltech
Multiple Cassiopea jellyfish on the bottom of a tank.
Credit: Caltech
A 3D model of the nucleus made with SPRITE: DNA regions in the "inactive hub" on chromosomes 15 (orange) and chromosome 18 (green) coming together around a large nuclear body in the nucleus (blue) called the nucleolus (red).
Credit: Courtesy of the Guttman laboratory
W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawai‘i
Credit: W.M. Keck Observatory
A mouse tibia that has been rendered transparent with Bone CLARITY. Stem cells appear distributed throughout the bone in red. The ability to see bone stem cell behavior is crucial for testing new osteoporosis treatments.
Credit: Science Translational Medicine, Greenbaum, Chan, et al; Gradinaru laboratory/Caltech
Seen as a light-colored plume, water jets out from the back of a larval dragonfly.