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2007

Michael Ortiz,

A ground-breaking ceremony for the new Walter and Leonore Annenberg Center for Information Science and Technology was held on Friday, December 7, 2007. Wallis Annenberg delivered these remarks: click here to read.

Building on six years of record-breaking developments, an international team of physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers led by Caltech joined forces to set new records for sustained data transfer among storage systems during the SuperComputing 2007 (SC07) conference. By combining FDT with FAST TCP, developed by Professor Steven Low, together with an optimized Linux kernel known as the "UltraLight kernel," the team reached an unprecedented throughput level of 10 gigabytes/sec with a single rack of servers, limited only by the speed of the disk systems. Read more... 11.29.07

The AT&T Tech Channel discusses Plasmonics with Harry Atwater, Howard Hughes Professor and Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science. New research in Plasmonics promises breakthroughs with implications ranging from the creation of faster than light computing, possible new weapons against cancer, and maybe even achieving invisibility. Video clip...

Full video presentation of the Fifty Years in Space Conference held at Caltech is now available: click here for details.

CS undergraduate Kevin Dick has been selected as a winner of the Computing Research Association's Outstanding Undergraduate Award for 2008. This award recognizes the top undergraduate students in North American universities who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research. Kevin was recognized for his achievements on several summer research projects (algorithms that take advantage of hardware prefetching; approximation factors for problems related to DNF minimization), coauthoring a conference publication, and maintaining an outstanding academic record.

Building on six years of record-breaking developments, an international team of physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers led by Caltech joined forces to set new records for sustained data transfer among storage systems during the SuperComputing 2007 (SC07) conference. By combining FDT with FAST TCP, developed by Professor Steven Low, together with an optimized Linux kernel known as the "UltraLight kernel," the team reached an unprecedented throughput level of 10 gigabytes/sec with a single rack of servers, limited only by the speed of the disk systems. Read more... 11.29.07

Wood is made of three tightly intertwined compounds; taking it apart is a challenge, and termites are among the few known animals that can do it. Professor Jared Leadbetter led a team of researchers from other universities, private industry, and the Department of Energy (DOE) in uncovering the genetic underpinnings and the roles of bacteria in wood digestion by "higher termites." These insects abound in tropical and subtropical ecosystems. What the team found, says Leadbetter, is "a comprehensive set of blueprints for the bacteria that help dismantle wood." This has recently become a focus of interest for those interested in developing an effective, industrial method to convert wood into ethanol. Read more... 11.21.07

Caltech undergraduates Euiwoong Lee (class of '09), Seungwoo Shin (class of '10), and Ben Zax (class of '10) have won the ACM Southern California Regional Programming Contest. Coached by Donnie Pinkston, the team was the only team to solve all six problems of the challenge. Caltech has won the regionals for the last 6 years straight - and eight years out of the last nine. Kudos programmers!

In October, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Council elected Paul Dimotakis as a Fellow of AAAS. He will be recognized for his many contributions to science and technology at the Fellows Forum to be held on 16 February 2008 during the AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston.

Ares Rosakis has received the 2007 D. R. Harting Award, from the Society of Experimental Mechanics (SEM) for the "Best Paper" published in Experimental Techniques. The title of the paper is "Supershear and Sub-Rayleigh to Supershear Transition Observed in Laboratory Earthquake Experiments". Rosakis and his co-authors, Dr. Kaiwan Xia and Professor Hiroo Kanamori received this award in June 2007 at the SEM Annual Conference, Springfield, MA.

Joe Shepherd has received the Numa Manson Medal awarded by the Institute for Dynamics of Explosions and Reactive Systems "for fundamental contributions to the understanding of explosion and detonation phenomena, application of his knowledge to the resolution of practical explosion problems, and for his mentoring of young researchers and fostering international collaboration in the explosion community." The Medal was presented at the Banquet of the 21st Colloquium in Poitiers, France in July 2007. This is the organization's highest honor and Shepherd is the youngest person ever to receive it.

The Alliance for Nanosystems VLSI (very-large-scale integration) unites researchers from Caltech's Kavli Nanoscience Institute (KNI) and the Laboratoire d'Electronique et de Technologie de l'Information-Micro- and Nano-Technologies (CEA/LETI-MINATEC) in Grenoble, France, to tackle the problem of creating complex architectures at the nanoscale. Read more... 11.05.07

2007 JPL Research and Technology Development Poster Session will be held at JPL (in von Kármán Auditorium and on the Mall) on Wednesday, 14 November 2007 from 8:00 am - 4:00 pm (authors next to their posters from 11:00 am - 2:00 pm). JPL researchers will present the results of nearly 150 projects of the internal Research and Technology Development (R&TD) Program, many of which benefit from contributions and participation by campus researchers. The poster session is open to all Caltech faculty, staff, and students; at 11:30 am, JPL's Director, Dr. Charles Elachi, will make opening remarks. Refreshments will be served. Attendees are encouraged to use the JPL/Campus Shuttle as parking at JPL is limited. Please bring your Caltech ID to ensure admittance.

Rudy Roy, Ben Sexson, and Dan Oliver, all Caltech alumni, have formed the non-profit organization Intelligent Mobility International (IMI), which is now among four finalists for a contest on "NOW," a PBS series. The Project Enterprise Contest will showcase a team that is using business tools to tackle a social problem. IMI is solving the problem of making robust wheelchairs from bicycles (that can handle rugged terrain in developing countries), and then distributing them to people who need them. Read more... 10.30.07

John Brady, Chevron Professor of Chemical Engineering and Professor of Mechanical Engineering, has been awarded the 2007 E.C. Bingham Medal by the The Society of Rheology for outstanding contributions to the field of rheology. In particular, he was recognized for his work on Stokesian dynamics. The award will be presented at the 79th Annual Meeting of the Society of Rheology in Salt Lake City, October 2007.

In honor of the 50 Years in Space conference recently hosted by GALCIT, the Caltech Archives has posted to its website the oral history of Homer J. Stewart (1915-2007), a Caltech alumnus from the early years of GALCIT (PhD 1940), and later a professor of aeronautics and JPL staff member. Other online oral histories related to Caltech's aeronautics program, JPL, and space exploration include those of Terry Cole, Norman H. Horowitz, Andrew P. Ingersoll, Arthur L. "Maj" Klein, Paul B. MacCready, John R. Pierce, William H. Pickering, Leon T. Silver, and James A. Westphal.

"CURIOUS," a two-hour documentary about Caltech researchers, will air on public television stations around the country beginning the week of October 1. The groundbreaking work that goes on at Caltech came to the attention of documentary makers at Thirteen/WNET New York, who decided to train their lenses on the stories they thought fascinating. Read more... 10.01.07

Congratulations to two new Caltech MacArthur Fellows: Michael Elowitz, Assistant Professor of Biology and Applied Physics, and Paul Rothemond, Senior Research Fellow in Computation and Neural Systems and Computer Science. The MacArthur Foundation supports highly creative individuals and institutions with the ability and the promise to make a difference in shaping and improving our future. Read more...

The NRG 0.1 lecture series, organized by Caltech's Energy Advisory Committee, will take place in Baxter Lecture Hall on Fridays from 2-3 p.m. through mid February. The first speaker, on October 5th, will be former Caltech professor/Provost and current Chief Scientist of BP, Steve Koonin, giving a broad overview of the global energy challenge. Future speakers include Sossina Haile, Professor of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering, Harry Atwater, Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science, and Jared Leadbetter, Associate Professor of Environmental Microbiology. Read more...

Fifty Years in Space: An Aerospace Conference Celebrating 50 Years of Space Technology September 19 - 21, 2007. Video library of all talks (click here)

EAS welcomes Azita Emami-Neyestanak to Caltech as Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering. Azita's research interests are in high-performance integrated circuits and systems. She is interested in developing new analog, digital and system-level solutions for building complex systems in highly-scaled and future technologies.

Materials on the Brink: Unprecedented Transforming Materials is the title of a new MURI project headed by Professor of Mechanics and Materials Science Kaushik Bhattacharya. With colleagues Harry Atwater (Howard Hughes Professor and Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science) and Sossina Haile (Professor of Materials Science and of Chemical Engineering), their graduate students at Caltech, and colleagues at five other participating universities, they aim todevelop new classes of active materialsthat undergo extremely low hysteresis structural transformation between phases with unusual combinations of electromagnetic, optical, and mechanical properties. Such materials provide unique opportunities to meet challenges in communications, sensors, guidance systems, antennas, reconfigurable electronics as well as biological-chemical-physical detection and response systems.

Joel Tropp has joined EAS as Assistant Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics. Dr. Tropp's research focuses on algorithms for solving computationally difficult problems that arise in applied mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering, and computer science.

Melany Hunt, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, has been appointed as vice provost for the Institute. Steve Mayo, Bren Professor of Biology and Chemistry and Executive Officer for Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics has also been appointed as vice provost. Hunt will focus on academic/educational functions, while Mayo will focus on research functions. Congratulations to both!

DARPA announced August 9 that Team Caltech is one of the 36 teams invited to the national qualifying event (NQE) for the 2007 Urban Challenge.

Adam Wierman

EAS welcomes Julia R. Greer to Caltech as Assistant Professor of Materials Science. Her research areas are in mechanical deformation and materials characterization at the nanoscale.

Sergio Pellegrino is joining the Division as Professor of Aeronautics and Civil Engineering on September 1st. His research areas include Design and Analysis of Space Structure Systems, Intelligent Adaptive Systems, and Evolutionary Optimization.

Sergio Pellegrino, the father of ultra-lightweight expanding space mirrors, has been elected to The Royal Academy of Engineering. Professor Pellegrino joins the Caltech faculty in September as Professor of Aeronautics and Civil Engineering. "Our new Fellows demonstrate the importance of engineering in the modern world," says Academy President Lord Browne of Madingley. "They are the cream of the UK's engineering talent and many of them are actively involved in meeting some of the world's greatest challenges: energy provision, climate change and sustainable use of materials. We salute their achievements and invite their help in moving engineering to the centre of society."

Clare Boothe Luce Postdoctoral Fellow Andrea Armani, Kerry Vahala, the Jenkins Professor of Information Science, Richard Flagan, McCollum-Corcoran Professor of Chemical Engineering, Scott Fraser, Rosen Professor of Biology, and colleagues have figured out a way to detect single biological molecules with a microscopic optical device. The method has already proven effective for detecting the signaling proteins called cytokines that indicate the function of the immune system, and it could be used in numerous medical applications, such as the extremely early detection of cancer and other diseases. Read more... 07.05.07

Caltech's Office of Technology Transfer co-sponsored GreenTech 2007 on June 14, 2007. The event showcased innovations emerging from Caltech, UCLA, and USC, as well as those from green companies.

NEMS³ 2007 Summer School and Conference July 3 – 12, 2007
The purpose of this program is to provide a pedagogical introduction to the vibrant field of nanomechanics (with particular applications to biology) and nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS), and to bring together active nanomechanics researchers from around the world. The emphasis was broad, including a week focused on primarily biological systems and a week on primarily quantum solid state systems. There were 8 short lecture courses and 16 technical conference talks.

Caltech's 113th Commencement Ceremony was held on Friday, June 8th. Jared Diamond, Professor of Geography, UCLA, addressed nearly 500 graduates. The EAS Division awarded 77 Bachelor of Science degrees; 52 Master of Science degrees; and 91 PhDs.

This week we remember and celebrate the achievements of Denice Denton. The first female Dean of Engineering at a major research university in the United States, Chancellor at UC Santa Cruz (and member of Caltech's Engineering and Applied Science Visiting Committee), Denton was a pioneering leader who significantly advanced the state of research, teaching, mentoring and diversity in engineering and technology across the nation. A powerful and highly effective force for change, Denton was an inspiration and role model to countless engineers and scientists.

Professor Homer Joe Stewart passed away on May 26th. Homer was a Professor of Aeronautics from 1942 to 1980. Starting as a graduate assistant at the GALCIT 10-foot wind tunnel, Homer (GALCIT PhD 1940), worked on meterology, theoretical and applied aerodynamics, particularly unsteady flow around supersonic airfoils and bodies of revolution. He also participated in many pioneering rocket projects, becoming a section manager of the analytical missile aerodynamics group at JPL and was one of the a co-founders of JPL. Read more... 05.31.07

Six Caltech graduate students are the recipients of Philanthropic Educational Organization (P.E.O.) Scholar Awards, including Dennice Gayme in control and dynamical systems. The women are part of the 85 award recipients, selected from over 700 applicants. This is the first time Caltech has garnered six awards from this competition. The P.E.O. Scholar Awards were established in 1991 to encourage and recognize scholarly excellence, academic achievement, and the potential to make significant contributions to a chosen field of endeavor. The awards provide educational support for women of the United States and Canada who are pursuing a graduate degree or are engaged in advanced study or graduate research.

In a new Scientific American article entitled "Breaking Network Logjams," Professor Michelle Effros and colleagues describe network coding - an approach that could dramatically enhance the efficiency and reliability of communications networks. At its core is the strange notion that transmitting evidence about messages can be more useful than conveying the messages themselves.

Two EAS faculty members have been elected fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Christof Koch, the Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology and professor of computation and neural systems, and Michael Ortiz, the Dotty and Dick Hayman Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering, join this year's inductees.

Richard Murray has been invited to receive the title of Doctor of Technology from the Faculty Board of the Engineering Faculty LTH at Lund University in Sweden on June 1, 2007. This award is being given to acknowledge Murray's contributions to the exchange of students and personnel between LTH and Caltech as well as joint development of courses and teaching material.

The 2007 rankings by U.S. News and World Report of U.S. graduate programs has placed Caltech in top spots in many areas: Aeronautics (1), Applied Mathematics (3), Chemical Engineering (2), Computer Engineering (6), Electrical Engineering (5), Environmental Engineering (8), Mechanical Engineering (3), and Engineering (7). The annual survey is now available on newsstands and at www.usnews.com.

In the online journal Science Express, Caltech applied physicists Harry Atwater, Henri Lezec, and Jen Dionne report that they have devised a way to make visible light travel in the opposite direction that it normally bends when passing from one material to another, like from air through water or glass. This could lead to "cloaking devices" that may render an object invisible.

Congratulations are due to Caltech's Programming Team - the team placed 12th in the 31st Annual World Finals of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), winning a Bronze medal. Caltech's team consisted of Hwan-seung Yeo, Paul Nelson, and Po-Ru Loh, along with coach Eric Stansifer. The teams were faced with solving eight highly complex computer programming problems, modeled on real-world business challenges, in only five hours. This is equal to a semester's worth of curriculum. Only one other U.S. team made it into the top 12; and only one team actually solved all eight problems - Warsaw University, the winner. More details...

Harry Atwater, Howard Hughes Professor and Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science, has authored the cover article of Scientific American (April 2007) with his article "The Promise of Plasmonics." He describes the potential of technologies that use electron density waves called plasmons. Among many potential applications, plasmonic circuits could help the designers of computer chips build fast interconnects that could move large amounts of data across a chip.

New from CaltechNews: The Life Aquatic with John Dabiri - a profile of Professor Dabiri and his stunning work on vortex formation.

On Wednesday, March 7, Professor John Seinfeld, the Louis E. Nohl Professor and Professor of Chemical Engineering, presented a Watson lecture entitled "Global Climate Change" at 8 p.m. in Beckman Auditorium. His talk focused on clarifying what we know about the current state of the climate, and where we are likely heading.

Former GALCIT professor, Yuan-Cheng "Bert" Fung (PhD '48) was awarded the 2007 Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize by the National Academy of Engineering "for the characterization and modeling of human tissue mechanics and function leading to prevention and mitigation of trauma." Fung received his Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Mathematics and joined the Aeronautics faculty in 1948. His early focus was on structural dynamics and aerodynamics.

Samantha Daly, graduate student in Mechanical Engineering, gave this year's Everhart Lecture, Thursday, February 22, 4-5 p.m., Guggenheim 101. She spoke about "Metals with Memory: How these amazing materials remember their shape."

Professor Mathieu Desbrun is featured in Technology Review for his unique approach to modeling fluid flow for animation applications. Read more...

Professor John W. Hutchinson, Abbott and James Lawrence Professor of Engineering, from the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, delivered the 2007 GALCIT Kliegel Lecture on January 19. Professor Hutchinson spoke on "Recent Developments in Thin Film Mechanics."

Professor Thomas Heaton has been elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. The Fellowship is awarded to scientists who have attained acknowledged eminence in one or more branches of geophysics. Heaton's continuing contributions are in the study of strong ground motions, the physics of earthquake rupture, earthquake warning systems, and building vibration.

Richard Murray, Everhart Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems and director of Information Science and Technology is the winner of the 2006 Feynman Prize, the Institute's highest teaching honor. He will present a talk entitled "Project-Based Teaching: CS/EE/ME 75 and the DARPA Grand Challenge." Murray will discuss teaching outside the classroom through project-based learning and explain how he turned the DARPA Grand Challenge competition into a hands-on teaching opportunity. At 5 to 6 p.m., January 18, in 101 Guggenheim Lab, Lees-Kubota Lecture Hall.

Melany L. Hunt, professor and executive officer of mechanical engineering, will describe the science behind the low-pitched droning that accompanies sand dune avalanching in a presentation titled "Booming Sand Dunes,” on Wednesday, January 17, 8 p.m., in the fourth and final program of the Fall/Winter 2006-07 Earnest C. Watson Lecture Series. The lecture will take place in Beckman Auditorium.

EAS welcomes Swaminathan Krishnan to Caltech as Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering.