Building the Caltech Connection

When Scott Cushing was growing up in West Virginia, he knew very little about scientific laboratories or which careers were available in the sciences. What he did know was that he loved to tinker with mechanical things, and he repaired cars for money and for fun. So when he got to college, at West Virginia University, a state college, he thought he might like to be an engineer. But it was when someone in a physics lab showed him a laser that his career trajectory was permanently changed.

Fast forward to 2018 when Cushing arrived at Caltech as an assistant professor of chemistry. He builds new scientific instrumentation using lasers like the one that captivated him as an undergrad. He immediately decided to start a mentoring program to give students from community colleges and other schools without strong research programs an opportunity to experience their own version of his laser moment—to find out if there is something in science that sparks their interest and then to find out if they would like to pursue it.

"After making my own career hops to end up as a professor, I wanted to try to create a program for LA-area people who have that scientific knack but have no way or no confidence to make their first step into the scientific realm," says Cushing.

That was the seed for a program that has since grown into Caltech Connection, a near-peer mentoring program that pairs Caltech graduate students and postdoctoral scholars one-on-one with undergraduate students drawn from four local community colleges (Pasadena City College, Compton College, Santa Monica College, and East LA College), Cal State Los Angeles, Cal State Dominguez Hills, and Charles Drew University, a historically Black graduate institution in South Los Angeles. More than 60 percent of mentees in the program come from low-income households and some 70 percent work at least part-time or as interns to pay for their education.

Caltech Connection completed its third full year in May. During the 2023–2024 academic year, the program gave nearly 50 students an opportunity to see what research is like at an institution that is fully equipped for state-of-the-art scientific work and with mentors who engage in that work daily.

"I wanted this program to help these individuals build their scientific identity and give them the base skills needed so that they could then move up to an intensive summer research experience for undergraduates or transfer to a research-intensive school," says Cushing.

For Kevin Aday, the program has provided just that kind of springboard. He first heard about Caltech Connection in fall 2022 during his first semester at Pasadena City College (PCC) from his physics professor. Aday applied and was accepted. At the start of the program, after watching a series of five-minute "elevator pitch"–style videos prepared by the participating mentors, Aday chose and got paired with Greg Lavrentiadis, a postdoctoral scholar research associate in mechanical and civil engineering who studies fault displacement and ground motion models of earthquakes.

Free-form mentoring

The structure and content of the Caltech Connection program is intentionally flexible and free form. Most mentor-mentee pairs meet once a week or once every other week. In the first half of the program, mentors often try to teach soft skills such as time management and how to read a scientific paper. Then in the second half, many mentors identify a project for their mentees to dig into—maybe completing a calculation, coding a problem, or shadowing them to learn how to run an instrument.

"The idea is not to have some strict protocol," says Cushing. "It really is getting the mentor to be a mini principal investigator, and the mentee is their mini grad student. By the end of the program, we hope that the mentees are making independent or joint contributions to their mentor's project, but we don't tell anyone exactly how they should get there because no one's path is identical."

Sweet successes

By early in 2023, Aday was working with Lavrentiadis to correct seismic records affected by instrument response during the M6.5 and M6.8 earthquakes in Taiwan the previous year. Aday continued with the program and was ready for a more advanced project the next year. He worked with Lavrentiadis to help create a model to characterize ground motions in Groningen, Netherlands, an area that has experienced human-made earthquakes caused by the removal of natural gases from underground reservoirs.

Aday says the best part of the program was being able to participate in world-class research. "I was a community college student, so research was something totally new to me," he says. "Getting the opportunity to not only observe but take part in the work being done in the lab was the most valuable experience that I've had in college thus far."

This fall, Aday will continue his studies at the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley. He credits much of his success during the transfer admission process to the experience he gained as a participant in Caltech Connection, both as a mentee and as a co-facilitator for the program's engineering subgroup, which brought the mentee-mentor pairs with an engineering focus together to help each other navigate the program and share experiences.

Aday is not alone in his successes both within the program and afterward. Impressively, about 80–90 percent of students from PCC who participate in Caltech Connection and similar programs at PCC are successful in transferring to research-intensive universities compared to only 10–20 percent of their peers from the same school. Students from the program have transferred to such schools as MIT, Cornell, and UCLA. One was awarded a Goldwater Scholarship. Others have landed summer fellowships at NASA, USC, Harvard, and even Caltech's WAVE program, which supports 10-week research projects for undergraduate students who are serious about pursuing graduate degrees in STEM fields.

"Caltech Connection is a true bridge that provides college students a space to hone their capabilities and catalyze their futures in science and engineering," says Tiffany Kimoto, executive director of the Kavli Nanoscience Institute at Caltech, who serves as an administrator for the program. "The mentees are incredible. I've watched some folks start off as shy students, uncertain of what they're doing at Caltech, and develop into stellar graduate researchers at top-rate institutions and leaders among their peers."

Getting a taste of real lab research

For Joya Stewart, another student from PCC who participated in Caltech Connection this year, the program was eye-opening not only in terms of what she could accomplish in the lab but also of what research can be. At the beginning of the program this last year, Stewart was paired with Gunho Kim, a postdoctoral scholar research associate in mechanical and civil engineering who does work with a polymer called polycyclooctene, which "remembers" its shape, returning to its original form even after deformation. Due to its biodegradable nature and ability to change shape under the skin, this material could be useful for medical implants. By heating the polymer in localized regions, the implant's structure could be altered to adapt as the body ages, providing the patient with a less invasive experience.

Before joining Caltech Connection, Stewart had already decided to major in mechanical engineering. She was part of the MATE ROV program in which students design, build, and compete with underwater robots in challenges against teams from around the world. But she knew nothing about shape-memory polymers. By the end of the program, with Kim's mentoring, she was able to conduct mechanical testing on the material, providing the group with data that will be used to build software capable of predicting the material's three-dimensional shape, especially during implant procedures.

"Being able to work in the lab and conduct my own experiments was the best part of the program for me," says Stewart. "I felt in control of certain aspects and was able to better understand the research material by experimenting with the polymers on my own."

Stewart, who is also headed to UC Berkeley in the fall, says Caltech Connection made her realize she would like to conduct STEM research before pursuing an industry career. "I realized how important research is and that it doesn't have to be purely theoretical," Stewart says. "Connecting with Gunho and other postdocs in Chiara Daraio's lab group made me realize how personalized research can be and how practical you can make it."

Mentoring is also good for mentors

Cushing notes that the program is not only about growth for the undergraduate students. It also provides a significant learning opportunity for mentors. "While the mentees often come in intimidated and/or they don't really know what they're working toward, this is also often the first time the mentors are working outside their own comfort zone," he says. "My favorite part is at the beginning of each year when both the mentor and mentee are kind of awkward because they don't know what they're doing. It actually allows a linkage that ends up accelerating the program, and together they figure it out."

Andrea Stegner, a graduate student in chemistry, has served as a mentor for Caltech Connection since the program's inception. While she says she experienced that initial awkwardness when starting out with her first mentee, she says she has grown tremendously in her mentoring and confidence as a result of the program.

"After three years of being a mentor, I'm definitely better at leading the students through the program," she says. And she has found that she truly enjoys mentoring. "This experience has reinforced my decision to stay in academia, where I will have more of a teaching and mentoring aspect to my future job," Stegner says.

Although her own research focuses on synthesizing organic chemicals, her mentees have come into the program with a variety of backgrounds and interests. Only one of her four mentees came in with any organic chemistry training, but she has found meaningful projects for each of them. One computer science major worked on a computational chemistry project with her. Another biology major came into the program wanting to study sea star wasting disease, an illness that affects echinoderms and can wipe out entire populations of sea stars. Although this was outside of their comfort zone, Stegner taught the student how to do a literature review.

"They might not be experts in the topic of my research, but they have all been very motivated and just generally interested in learning," Stegner says.

One of her former mentees is transferring to Cornell and another to UC Berkeley. "It's so exciting to see where they will go next and what they do," says Stegner. "When research is hard, sometimes these are the little moments that bring some joy back—to see excitement from the younger students."

The Caltech Connection program is supported by funding from the diversity committees of Caltech's divisions, the Preer Family, E.J. Kavounas, the Kavli Nanoscience Institute, the Resnick Sustainability Institute, and the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, with support from the Student-Faculty Programs Office.