Groundbreaking science and engineering start with people. In this issue of our campaign e-magazine, you will meet bioinspired engineers, earthquake modelers, sustainability scientists, discipline-crossing undergraduates, and donors who propel discovery at Caltech.
On the cover: Conversations spark creativity and collaborations at Red Door Marketplace in Caltech’s Hameetman Center, named for trustee Fred Hameetman (BS ’62) and his wife, Joyce.
Profiles
A Break Through Trio
The biomechanical fundamentals of flight, new ways to pinpoint brain cells that are linked to disease, and the fate of our private data: These are just a few areas where Caltech’s Break Through campaign fuels groundbreaking research.
Resnick Fellow Kyle Virgil aims to create a more sustainable future. Trustee Stewart Resnick and his wife, Lynda, founders of The Wonderful Company, are helping to make this work possible. In September 2019, they increased their investment in Caltech’s Resnick Sustainability Institute with a new commitment of $750 million.
Transcript
Being able to turn science into a tangible way for somebody you’ll never meet to access energy easier to power their home or to support their families is extremely encouraging—and very lofty. My name is Kyle Virgil. I’m a third-year graduate student here at Caltech, and I’m a current Resnick Fellow.
Why Solar Energy?
Growing up, I had a real passion for understanding the way that light interacts with matter to create electricity and do all these really interesting things. I look at materials called semiconductors that have special properties, wherein they can absorb sunlight and turn it into electricity that we use to power our lives, or make fuels, or do a lot of wonderful things with.
Why Caltech?
There’s such a huge breadth of science that occurs at the level of light interacting with matter. When I came here, I was able to see that we use on this campus technologies that turn sunlight into not only electricity, but into everyday fuels. We have these devices that when you shine light on them, they clean wastewater. Collaboration at Caltech is something that I find extremely fascinating and wonderful. The Resnick Institute facilitates that collaboration by providing exposure to a subset of these investigators that are really interested and really driven by these questions about the nature of the way that our world works in the context of providing a sustainable future for ourselves.
What Motivates You?
What’s really fun when you bring all these different mindsets and all these different perspectives together is that they can synergistically create this wonderful new understanding of the problem, and therefore a solution to that problem that otherwise we would not be able to take advantage of. Being here, I’ve had the opportunity to actually start my own original research projects. It’s just exciting to know that I can continue to take two very different scientific perspectives—materials science and chemistry—and apply them in a new way to the development of photovoltaic devices and solar energy technologies that will drive the future one day. It makes me very proud to be a part of a community of passionate people that are able to tackle these huge challenges in energy and sustainability.
Interactive Gallery
In Honor Of
Caltech’s legacy is built on 100-plus years of achievement by visionary researchers and their supporters. During Break Through: The Caltech Campaign, hundreds of donors have made gifts in honor of Caltech luminaries to celebrate the Institute’s past and help secure a prosperous future.
At the interface of computer science (CS) and other fields (X), Caltech researchers are getting together to radically accelerate discovery.
For me, in CS+X, the X stands for a lot of different things. So, for instance, in radio astronomy I’ve been helping a team of scientists from around the world. I helped develop the imaging algorithms that took us from the noisy, sparse data we collect from telescopes around the world to produce an image of a black hole. I’ve worked on medical imaging. Also, we’ll be using imaging to help with studying clouds for climate science applications. So as we continue to push the boundaries of our knowledge, we’re starting to reach limits on where traditional methods allow us to sense the things we want to see. This requires us to put computation into the equation. How do we use our computation to make better images and to pull out things from images that we’ve already taken? We can try to find hidden patterns in data. For me, actually, the X is really exciting.
CS+X, for me, would be CS plus causation. Causation, I think, is fundamental to the sciences. It’s one thing influencing another thing, and if I change something, what kind of consequences result from that sort of influence? One of the things that I’ve worked on is neural recordings in zebrafish, to say what neuron is actually influencing which other neuron. Biologists have figured out how to measure the neural activation in zebrafish, and it’s like little light bulbs going off. It’s physicists and biologists who develop the techniques to measure all of these things. Then, it’s computer scientists who use computer vision algorithms to identify what neurons are active. And then, it’s people like me who discover what sort of causal relations are active. And then it goes all the way back to the biologists. So we’ve got this long chain of people working together in this analysis of this data. Well, I think it’s incredible. It’s the kind of thing that you really can only do at Caltech.
Chemistry is nothing if not a huge space of possible molecules. So what you need to do is find a way to organize that space, to enable you to make connections between different molecules in a more efficient manner. I need a good way to take things that I know about existing molecules and to predict things about other molecules that I don’t know. Recent years have seen an explosion in computational power, in the availability of data, and in the sophistication of algorithms to combine that computational power with the available data. At the heart of it, we’re trying to find these needles in a haystack that are so valuable in the form of drugs, in the form of catalysts, in the form of batteries. Bringing people together from different backgrounds around a really important problem is really what Caltech’s all about.
In my case, the X in CS+X stands for control theory and synthetic biology. You can view a cell as a computer. And, moreover, these individual cell computers can communicate with each other. So we can use computer science and control theory to understand how reactions lead to certain computations, and then once we understand them, we’re able to reprogram the cells. Synthetic biology is how we develop smart therapies in the treatment of diseases such as cancer, and also gastrointestinal disorders, as well as wound healing. It’s an exciting time to be part of this research.
Caltech’s basically been monitoring earthquakes for about a century at this point. We operate a network of about 500 sensors, together with our partners at the U.S. Geological Survey and the State of California. These are very, very sensitive instruments, and yet these earthquakes are still buried within all of this noise. We typically think of earthquakes as just the shaking that we feel on the surface, but, in reality, there are faults somewhere that are moving way below the surface. So we’re using artificial intelligence to detect micro-earthquakes. And these small events are important because they tell a much more complete story about how these earthquakes are evolving in space and time. Trying to reconstruct an image of the earthquake rupture process beneath the surface is the goal. In my work, CS+X means that being able to extract all this information from the data is going to lead us to a new era of earthquake monitoring and understanding.
The biomechanical fundamentals of flight, new ways to pinpoint brain cells that are linked to disease, and the fate of our private data: These are just a few areas where Caltech’s Break Through campaign fuels groundbreaking research.
From Fruit Flies to Prosthetics
The human brain contains about 80 billion neurons. The fruit fly’s brain has just 200,000, yet that is enough to control the complex motions required for flight. In Michael Dickinson’s lab, graduate student Alysha de Souza gives flies a genetically encoded marker that causes muscles to light up when they activate. In this way, she can study which muscles fire and when during flight, and which neurons control this process. “We can characterize specific flight motifs, meaning clusters of motor neurons and muscles that are activated consistently,” she says.
De Souza is building a model of flight that could have implications far beyond increasing our understanding of the fruit fly. “We’re able to look at the mechanisms that underlie this transformation from sensory input to motor output,” she says. “Because of the numerical simplicity of the fruit fly, we can really see how the mechanics work, and we can apply that knowledge to other systems.” A deep understanding of flight biomechanics, for example, could help engineers improve the design of prosthetic devices for humans who have lost mobility.
De Souza has made contacts across campus and around the world thanks in part to support from the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech. That funding allowed her to attend conferences where she met other scientists in the field with whom she now collaborates on flight research.
Caltech’s Yuki Oka developed Cell-SELECT (short for Cell-type control via Splice-capture of Expressed Locus Effector by CRISPR Targeting), a new technique to target and manipulate specific types of neurons in the brain without affecting others. This approach could lead to effective and safe treatments for neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease. The Oka lab has proven the concept by using viruses to deliver DNA constructs to distinct brain targets. “We’ve shown that this process can be done in a very efficient way, much more efficient than any other existing technique,” Oka says.
Biomedical studies with enormous potential—such as this one—often face funding roadblocks, though, because researchers must demonstrate early results in order to secure large federal research grants. That’s where campaign support comes in. In 2019, Oka received funds from the Rothenberg Innovation Initiative and the Associates Provost’s Discretionary Fund created by Caltech Associates members Kim and Ginger Caldwell. “These Caltech funding mechanisms are much quicker, and they fund challenging work that’s high-risk, high-return,” Oka says. “It helps us show that this research is the real thing and that we can take it to the next step.”
The influx of big data about human health informs new methods for diagnosis and treatment. But the data revolution has come with downsides for health care, too. When people click on a link to obtain information about a certain disease, for example, they sometimes reveal health data that should remain private. Additionally, medical data sets drawn from incomplete samples of the population can be skewed toward a prevalent race or gender, leading to biased findings or treatments.
Senior Rona Yu, whose future plans include medical school, came to Caltech with the goal of using computer science to understand the technology at the root of these issues. “After I complete my MD, I hope to supplement clinical practice with research that applies my course specialization in machine learning and data science to medical problems,” she says. “Ultimately, I aspire to understand the unintended consequences surrounding the application of novel technologies in the clinical workflow, and how we can address those consequences through public policies.”
Yu designed her own cross-disciplinary course of study, focused on data and privacy. She credits scholarship support for bringing her to Caltech and providing such an opportunity. “The freedom to explore a wide variety of subjects has allowed me to take advantage of Caltech’s uniquely interdisciplinary community through projects ranging from applied physics to public policy to neuroscience,” she says. “This has helped me target the types of questions I get most excited about and meet incredibly successful and supportive mentors.”
Rona Yu (Caltech class of 2020) is a computer science major who received support from the John and Ursula Kanel Charitable Foundation Scholarship Fund and the Michael Mathes Endowed Scholarship Fund.