When you embark on the never-been-done-before, there is no instruction manual to tell you how to succeed. At Caltech, we know it takes an abundance of creativity.
Explore how Caltech people are forging their own paths.
Juan Felipe Gomez doesn’t always operate under the old rules. If he did, this physics major wouldn’t be exploring the quantum mechanical nature of materials right now. He wouldn’t be friends with the kitchen staff at Chandler Café. In fact, he wouldn’t be attending Caltech.
Caltech trustee, venture capitalist, and donor Walter Kortschak (MS ’82) has a vision for how to build the artificially intelligent future, and it starts with empowering Caltech graduate students to follow their imaginations. In this video, he trades ideas with the first three students to be named Kortschak Scholars.
Investigating Earth’s ancient history. Gaining new knowledge that could help inform the search for life at the edge of our solar system. Comprehending unseen forces that influence our changing climate. Victoria Orphan’s fascination with microbes connects her to all of that.
How do they do it? We asked members of the Caltech community to describe their creative process and tell us what inspires them.
Know the Rules, Then Break Them
“Creativity is about understanding the rules first. In science, if you ignore accepted theories you have random numbers. In music, if you disregard harmonics you get noise. Whether I’m analyzing interstellar data from Voyager, building a particle instrument that will visit the sun, or penning a musical composition, I begin with established knowledge. You need to understand the boundaries before you can push and play with them.” -Jamie Rankin, physics graduate student and member of the Caltech Orchestra and Caltech-Occidental Wind Orchestra
Offline and Outdoors
“As a new professor, I want to carve out my own research niche. I often take my laptop offline, go outside, and start writing my thoughts. I’ll usually have loud music playing through headphones to keep me focused. To make contributions in science that are not just iterative, you need time to think isolated from the outside world. Hiking is another way I like to unplug and work through ideas.” -Kimberly See, assistant professor of chemistry
Inspiration from Everyday Interactions
“As an applied researcher in the social sciences, I have the goal of identifying the true motivations behind people’s choices. Creativity for me is the process of using various methods and techniques from different disciplines to inform my analysis. Observing how politicians interact with others is a particularly interesting study in complex human behavior.” –Gabriel Lopez-Moctezuma, assistant professor of political science
In Nature and in the Moment
“I am intentional about creativity, and I cultivate it through writing, isolation, and observation. Of these, I work hard on being a keen observer and trying not to take everyday occurrences for granted. Watching a bird dive and catch fish is inspiring. Knowing that there are 40 species of cormorant birds but only one is flightless gives me a sense of awe. Life is mysterious and beautiful.” -Rob Phillips, the Fred and Nancy Morris Professor of Biophysics, Biology, and Physics
A Community of Creatives
“When I can move past the imposter syndrome I sometimes have, I find that other Caltech undergrads make me more creative. I like hearing how they’re approaching their SURF projects or learning about their unique career goals. Where I once sought the clearly defined path, I am now more comfortable with the messy problems and the untraditional ideas. More and more, I’m seeking different viewpoints.” -Ramya Deshpande, bioengineering undergrad
It’s as if Gomez had integrated the lessons of quantum physics into his own life: In a universe where a photon is both a particle and a wave, and Schrödinger’s cat is both alive and dead, the classical formula isn’t set in stone.
Case in point: On the last day of freshman physics, Professor David Hsieh gave a talk about his active research projects, hoping to whet his rookie students’ appetites for the complexity to come.
Impulsively, Gomez approached Hsieh on the spot and asked to work in his lab.
This—as internship-seeking undergrads know—is not how it’s typically done.
“I was pretty bummed when he said no,” Gomez admits. But he asked again, with two months’ additional study under his belt, and Hsieh offered him an assignment that led to a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF).
Hsieh’s lab studies the novel quantum electronic phases of matter in solids. His team had just acquired a new laser, and Hsieh wanted the old laser torn down for parts. Gomez’s task: to figure out how a shoebox-sized component called the Pockels cell could be repurposed.
There was no instruction manual. Yet by end of the summer, Gomez was an authority on the Pockels cell, having coded a program to control it and then designed, built, and carried out a battery of experiments to assess its capabilities.
In January, Gomez’s presentation on the Pockels cell won second prize in Caltech’s 2018 Perpall Speaking Competition. Not bad for a rule-bending freshman.
Gomez was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and grew up in Johns Creek, Georgia. His dad works in finance. His mom helps immigrant women achieve self-sufficiency. Younger brother Pablo is attending Georgia Tech. Growing up, Gomez enjoyed watching Jackie Chan Adventures on TV and playing music. Even now, he turns to the classical guitar to “de-stress.”
Listen to Gomez play John Clarke’s “To Live”
Gomez first heard about Caltech while watching a Hollywood disaster movie. Seeing a Caltech seismologist keep hero Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson one step ahead of the Big One in the 2015 blockbuster San Andreas piqued Gomez’s interest. That same afternoon, he explored Caltech’s website and discovered that the freshman application deadline was only two days away.
Putting together last-minute personal statements is not how it’s typically done, but Gomez applied anyway and was accepted. A financial aid package that included donor-funded scholarships made it possible for him to attend Caltech.
The thing Gomez likes best about Caltech is how small it is.
“What that allows me to do is build my own community here,” he says.
That community includes an eclectic mix of interests, ages, and languages. Gomez particularly enjoys his friendships with the Spanish-speaking cooking and cleaning staff. In flawless Spanish, he’ll strike up conversations with them during their coffee breaks. Several have introduced him to their kids, hoping some of his budding-scientist patina will rub off.
Gomez also promotes science to Pasadena middle and high school students through the Caltech Latino Association of Students in Engineering and Sciences.
“The main thing I want to show these kids is that people who look like them and talk like them can also do science,” says Gomez, who is club president.
For this summer’s SURF project, Gomez is interning in the condensed matter physics lab of Caltech’s president, Thomas F. Rosenbaum, holder of the Sonja and William Davidow Presidential Chair and professor of physics. Working with an enormously powerful freezer, Gomez is incrementally cooling chromium from 28 to 200 mK while applying immense pressure (>40 GPa), with the goal of inducing superconductivity in the element. “No one has put chromium in these extreme conditions before,” he says. “If it works, I’ll be the first person in the world to see chromium either go superconducting or reach some other new state. I’m very, very excited about that!”
In seeking the internship, he used advice from mentor and Avery House faculty-in-residence Antonio Rangel (BS ’93) about how to write professional email messages. But Gomez shunned the classical rules by email-blasting 15 physics professors at once. The gambit paid off—he received 10 interview invitations.
With one SURF under his belt and another nearly complete, this rising junior has set his sights on becoming a physics professor. No doubt he’ll have many insights to share with rule-bending students.
A member of CEMI (Caltech’s Center for Environmental Microbial Interactions), Orphan studies microorganisms in extreme environments, such as areas of the seafloor where methane, hydrogen sulfide, and other gases and fluids emerge from cracks in Earth’s crust. Her research is supported in part by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Agouron Institute, and the Simons Foundation.
Exploring our own ocean world is an important step toward accessing remote and extreme environments such as the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, which are believed to host subsurface oceans. From their kilometers-deep trenches, canyons, and undersea volcanoes to their ice-covered poles, Earth’s oceans are valuable natural testing grounds—much in the way Earth’s deserts are for NASA’s Mars rover prototypes.
To explore beneath the thick icy crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa, for example, JPL designed a special rover called BRUIE (Buoyant Rover for Under-Ice Exploration) that is being tested at Caltech’s Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory.
Studying life in extreme environments on Earth also will broaden our understanding of the range of biological diversity that can exist. This knowledge could help guide our search for potential life-sustaining conditions or precursors of life elsewhere in the universe.
Microorganisms with diverse metabolic capabilities existed long before free oxygen was introduced into our planet’s atmosphere approximately 2.4 billion years ago. Interpreting the role these anaerobes have played in their coevolution with Earth can help us understand how they help shape our biosphere today.
Along with Woody Fischer and Alex Sessions, I codirect a five-week summer international geobiology training course for graduate students and postdocs. How microbial life affects the environment is a major focus. We study both past and present: ancient sedimentary rocks and fossils as well as the modern biogeochemistry and ecology of Mono Lake, Mammoth Lakes, Sulfur Mountain, and Naples Beach.
We know that single-cell microbes—archaea and bacteria—work collaboratively to break down methane in the deep ocean. The question is: How does this partnership work? By adapting high-resolution techniques such as fluorescence in situ hybridization and secondary ion mass spectrometry (FISH-nanoSIMS), we have been able to visualize this metabolic activity as it is occurring.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that we don’t yet know how to effectively sequester. The microorganisms I study are master chemists. They oxidize methane to carbon dioxide deep in the ocean where conditions trap the carbon dioxide before it can reach our atmosphere. And the microbes do so on a slim energy budget. We might pick up some clues from them about how we can mitigate the effects of climate-warming gases.
Asking me to choose a favorite microbe is like asking parents to pick which child is their favorite. I’m enamored with many microbes: the recently discovered large “cable bacteria” that stretch well over a millimeter in length and appear to be electrically conductive; the anaerobic ammonia-oxidizing planctomycetes, which store rocket fuel (hydrazine) in a specialized vacuole in their cells; and, of course, the deep-sea methane-consuming archaea and their sulfate-reducing bacterial symbionts that we have been studying in my lab for nearly two decades.
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