Over the last decade, Break Through: The Caltech Campaign catalyzed new avenues of research and discovery. The generosity of its donors provided faculty and students with the resources and freedom to pursue their most innovative ideas, transform science, and benefit society. As the Institute marks the close of this initiative, members of the Caltech community reflect on the commitments and support of 14,500 donors, who gave a total of $3.4 billion. Each of their gifts has invigorated the collaborative, boundary-pushing spirit that defines Caltech and makes extraordinary discoveries and advancements possible. The Break Through is just the beginning.
Caltech president Thomas F. Rosenbaum, Sonja and William Davidow Presidential Chair and professor of physics, and Board of Trustees chair David Lee (PhD ’74) look back on the Break Through campaign.
A “playground for robots,” a neuroscience nexus, and a quantum-computing wonderland are just a few of the spaces and places through which Break Through: The Caltech Campaign has reshaped the Caltech campus.
Cohorts that unite scholars and researchers from a wide variety of backgrounds are crucial to Caltech’s culture of interdisciplinary collaboration. Donors to Break Through: The Caltech Campaign have amplified existing cohorts and established new ones.
The creation of new instruments to investigate captivating and pressing questions is part of Caltech’s DNA, and empowering scientists and engineers to develop these tools and devices has been a core tenet of this campaign. Break Through-supported instrumentation aids in the hunt for Earth-like planets, the fight against COVID-19, and the creation of a quantum internet.
Idris Sunmola
WAVE Fellow, current undergraduate at Northwestern University
I worked and learned under Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor of Computing, to devise machine-learning algorithms to help surgeons using robots in surgery. This is really the nexus point of computer science and physiology. The goal is to democratize health care, and, therefore, to provide lifesaving procedures to everyone regardless of societal and economic factors.
From the moment I stepped foot on the Caltech campus, I knew I was in a special place. My time was made even more memorable by my WAVE fellowship cohort, a group of young researchers eager to do science at the cutting edge. I’ve never been more inspired to use science to tackle the pressing problems faced by society, and I cannot wait to see the impact other WAVE participants will have on their communities.
Caltech’s WAVE Fellows program aims to foster diversity by increasing the participation of underrepresented students in science and engineering.
Laure Delisle
Kortschak Scholar
In the Computational Vision Laboratory of Pietro Perona, Allen E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computation and Neural Systems, we focus on how machines can best learn from human experts in humanitarian relief, wildlife conservation, and behavioral science. For my PhD, I explore efficient forms of communication between experts and computer vision models to understand better ways to guide visual machine-learning tasks.
The Kortschak scholarship empowers me to consider new research directions and to pursue them with my adviser’s support. It is an incredibly exciting feeling to be part of a cohort of like-minded researchers all carving bold and interdisciplinary research paths. Seeing them gaining momentum in their own lines of research inspires me to pursue innovative ideas and propels my own research forward.
The Kortschak Scholars program, established by businessman and Caltech trustee Walter Kortschak (MS ’82), supports incoming Caltech computing and mathematical science PhD students, offering two years of support to allow them to explore the field’s cutting edge.
Nicholas Sarai
Biotechnology Leadership Pre-doctoral Training Program (BLP) Trainee
I study how biological systems adapt, innovate, and multiply, and how humanity might leverage those abilities toward scalable solutions for a more sustainable world. Some of the many areas ripe for the application of biotechnology are pollutant degradation via engineered enzymes, the synthesis and application of nitrogenous fertilizer, and creation of chemicals from nonpetrochemical feedstocks.
I had relatively little experience in my early scientific career in understanding how industrial science is conducted. Making a positive impact through biotechnology requires consideration of complexities outside the scope of scientific knowledge alone, including the pathways to development, commercialization, and deployment. By exposing me to leaders from academia, industry, and government, the BLP has grounded this perspective and opened new avenues for making an impact through biotech innovations.
The purpose of Caltech’s Biotechnology Leadership Pre-doctoral Training Program is to produce world-class investigators who can address fundamental research questions and also apply discoveries to solving real-world problems. The BLP is administered by the Donna and Benjamin M. Rosen Bioengineering Center.
Niyati Desai
Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) Affiliate
At the Caltech Exoplanet Technology Laboratory, we specialize in the direct imaging of exoplanets, and we aim to see a planet very close to a bright star. I am working with Dimitri Mawet, professor of astronomy and Jet Propulsion Laboratory research scientist, to explore the potential for a new type of coronagraph instrument to be used in future space telescopes. [Editor’s note: See the story “An Instrumental Campaign” for more information on this research.] Using coronagraphs to block out primary starlight, as well as adaptive optics, we develop instruments that can image a planet whose host star is 100 billion times brighter than the planet.
The KISS program has provided a broad range of opportunities for me to meet distinguished researchers and learn about exoplanet-exploration efforts at Caltech and JPL [which the Institute manages for NASA]. As a KISS Affiliate, I’m inspired by meeting so many accomplished scientists and engineers who share my passion for space exploration.
Nominated by the Caltech faculty, KISS Affiliates are an ongoing cohort of the Institute’s graduate students and postdocs who are seen as the next generation of space-exploration leaders.
Kurt Dahlstrom
Resnick Postdoctoral Fellow
I research how the microbes that colonize the roots of food crops and other ecologically important plants compete and collaborate with one another to form communities that govern plant health. I hope to learn how the composition of these communities can confer resistance to disease or drought upon the crops.
The kind of collaboration exemplified by the Resnick fellows cohort is a huge reason why I wanted to work here, where there is a diverse community of scientists, not just biologists, working on sustainability from different angles. Being part of that group has allowed me to attend meetings on campus every couple of months with chemists, geoscientists, and materials scientists, where I could see the bigger picture.
The Resnick fellows include graduate students and postdoctoral scholars affiliated with the Resnick Sustainability Institute (RSI), which advances global sustainability through transformational science, engineering, and education.
Selective, diverse, collaborative. These attributes, which have long been part of the Caltech ethos, are cultivated within cohorts across campus. Donors to Break Through: The Caltech Campaign have invested in a variety of initiatives to bring together interdisciplinary groups of scholars, from incoming undergraduates to faculty members, and provide them with resources to share perspectives, follow their curiosity, and embark on unconventional research pursuits. Here, we spotlight three cohorts that exemplify and amplify Caltech’s culture of collaboration.
This summer, the Freshman Summer Research Institute (FSRI), a five-week program for incoming students from populations traditionally underserved and underrepresented in STEM, hosted 30 students, the largest in-person cohort of the program’s existence. FSRI creates a learning community to prepare undergraduates for academic success. Incoming first-year students are enrolled in an intensive math course, participate in a research project, and learn about campus services and resources. And every aspect of the program—even during the summer of 2020, when it was conducted online due to the pandemic—is designed to help students develop team-building and communication skills.
Here, some of the 2021 FSRI students (clockwise from top left) talk about how the program introduced them to the collaborative culture at Caltech.
• “Asking questions, offering explanations, giving each other space to speak—I’m learning that, through these efforts, collaboration is productive and useful,” says Chi “Cellie” Cap. “Throughout high school, there wasn’t a lot of truly collaborative work, and opportunities to actively participate in research were few and far between.” During the FSRI program, postdoctoral scholar Zoya Vallari oversaw Cap’s research on neutrino oscillations in the Charles C. Lauritsen Laboratory of High Energy Physics. “A neutrino is a very small and weakly interacting elementary particle: think electrons, but much smaller and harder to detect,” Cap explains. “Our project measures some of the parameters that affect neutrinos as they travel through space.”
• FSRI is structured to provide students like (from left) Darleine Abellard, Katherine Xu, and Tessa Pierce the opportunity to work as a team to tackle computational and proof-based math problems. “Participating in the FSRI workshops helped me grasp concepts fully and explain them in multiple ways,” says Pierce. “Proof writing, along with the collaborative process of talking through problems, definitely helped deepen my understanding of the material.”
• Jayden Nyamiaka, who conducted research under the mentorship of Adam Blank, teaching assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences, joins the more than half of undergraduates who conduct research within their first year at Caltech. FSRI aims to level the playing field for its participants, given that high school research opportunities are not equally available to all; it pairs each student with a faculty member, postdoc, or graduate student for a five-week research project in their chosen area of study. At the end of the program, each FSRI student delivers a TED-style talk about their experience to mentors and peers, which provides the cohort members with experience in how to present scientific results.
• In addition to meeting for math lectures and workshops four days each week, FSRI participants including (from left) Juan Renteria, Aija Washington, Carlos Olivas, and Alejandra Vazquez-Yanez also gathered to play kickball, navigate escape rooms, watch movies, and sing karaoke. Olivas says that in addition to bonding with his cohort group, the program also helped connect him to others in the Caltech community. “FSRI provided much more than just the opportunity to conduct research,” he shares. “Because through the research, I was introduced to an incredible network of people.”
FSRI is sponsored in part by a grant from Johnson & Johnson that aims to increase participation of women in medicine and technology development. Other major donors include Leigh Engen (BS ’99) of the Twenty-Seven Foundation and Caltech trustee Mason Smith (BS ’09).
The Schmidt Academy is a pilot program at Caltech for computer software engineers who recently received a BS from Caltech or Harvey Mudd College. The Schmidt scholars collaborate with researchers in labs across campus to develop stable, adaptable software platforms that will enhance and accelerate scientific progress.
The academy, which was started in 2019, is designed to transform the culture of software development at Caltech by incorporating the newest techniques and technologies from software engineering directly into research groups. “Academia has fallen behind industry in best practices for software engineering,” explains Mike Gurnis, the John E. and Hazel S. Smits Professor of Geophysics and the Schmidt Academy’s inaugural director. “Through this program, we are committed to elevating software for academic research and accelerating scientific progress at Caltech. Given its success to date, we envision that the Schmidt Academy has the potential to serve as a model by which high-quality scientific software is developed at other academic research institutions.”
The current Schmidt Academy Scholars include (clockwise from top left):
• Anya Wallace (left), who works in the lab of Chiara Daraio (right), Caltech’s G. Bradford Jones Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics, to build software infrastructure for an open-source database of engineered materials. Wallace is learning firsthand about the researchers’ objectives and challenges, which enables her to design a robust data framework that will spur collaborations not only at Caltech but also within the greater scientific community.
• Alfredo Gomez, who took a different route with his BS in computer science. Rather than going directly into academia or industry, Gomez recognized an unconventional opportunity to gain specialized training and hands-on experience in the lab of Michael Roukes, the Frank J. Roshek Professor of Physics, Applied Physics, and Bioengineering. “The Schmidt Academy is establishing new standards for research,” Gomez explains. “My efforts will make a difference beyond what I could accomplish working for a private company. I get to help advance discoveries.”
• Rupesh Jeyaram (BS ’20), Julia Vendemiatti, and Dennis Yatunin (BS ’20) (from left to right), who meet weekly with other Schmidt scholars to talk shop. Although they work in labs across campus and in different research areas, the engineers gain insights from one another’s strategies and approaches. Jeyaram designs atmospheric remote sensing software that will enable scientists to better understand climate processes on a global scale; Vendemiatti is developing a three-dimensional visualization package of cells and their genes to accelerate the engineering of useful viruses for therapies for neurological diseases; Yatunin works on an Earth system model that can learn from diverse data sources to produce accurate climate predictions with quantified uncertainties.
• Iman Wahle (BS ’20), who majored in computer science at Caltech with a plan to study neuroscience in graduate school. She deferred that step to join the Schmidt Academy because she wanted to develop her programming skills before delving deeper into the brain. Wahle’s project complements both her engineering expertise and her neuroscience interest: she is developing software that can determine how activity in certain regions of the brain affects other regions. This interdisciplinary effort bridges the labs of Frederick Eberhardt, Caltech professor of philosophy, and Ralph Adolphs, the Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Biology.
The Schmidt Academy for Software Engineers is supported by Eric and Wendy Schmidt by recommendation of Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative that aims to advance science and technology by bringing together and supporting exceptional people across fields.
The Heritage Medical Research Institute (HMRI), a nonprofit founded by physician and Caltech senior trustee Richard N Merkin, MD, enabled the creation of the Heritage Research Institute for the Advancement of Medicine and Science at Caltech in 2015 to fuel breakthroughs and to usher those discoveries out of labs and into the hands of physicians in the form of tools and interventions that improve lives. The program supports and encourages scientists and engineers known as HMRI Investigators—nine at any given time—to work collaboratively in pursuit of high-risk, high-reward fundamental work that underpins better methods for detecting, preventing, and treating diseases.
HMRI investigators meet regularly, sharing diverse perspectives to find and draw connections between basic discoveries in biology, chemistry, computer science, engineering, geology, physics, and the social sciences. They then partner directly with clinicians from research hospitals and medical schools to examine the potential of these findings and develop applications in the form of better medicines, targeted therapies, and diagnostic tools.
Here (clockwise from top left), we explore the work of six Caltech faculty members who, under the aegis of HMRI, have leveraged their curiosity with teamwork and financial support to shorten the distance from bench to bedside.
• A collaboration between HMRI investigators Azita Emami, the Andrew and Peggy Cherng Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering, and Mikhail Shapiro, professor of chemical engineering, led to the development of a microdevice they call ATOMS (short for addressable transmitters operated as magnetic spins). Using a set of integrated antennas, sensors, and wireless transmission technology, the chip resonates at different frequencies as it moves through the body. This invention, which physicians will be able to track with great accuracy inside the body, has the potential to improve surgical precision and to release drugs at targeted locations. The device has yielded several patents as well as a startup company.
• HMRI provided Sarah Reisman, Bren professor of chemistry, with no-strings-attached research funds that have allowed her research group to work on new chemical reactions. For instance, by stitching together carbon atoms, the group has been able to craft synthetic versions of pleuromutilin, an antibiotic normally derived from a fungus. Using that experience as their guide, the team now hopes to produce synthetic pleuromutilin efficiently in large quantities and develop new, more effective antibiotics. In addition to driving advances in organic chemistry, outcomes of these investigations also may help propel work in related fields, such as materials science and biology. The HMRI program provides researchers with a venue for exploring the ripple effects of discoveries across disciplines; computational biologist Matt Thomson, for instance, credits Reisman with teaching him new techniques in chemical synthesis.
• HMRI provides investigators like Rebecca Voorhees (left), assistant professor of biology and biological engineering; Mitch Guttman (center), professor of biology; and Matt Thomson (right), assistant professor of computational biology, with resources to conduct research projects that may lead not only to breakthroughs but also to the consideration of new and important questions that they would be unable to pursue if they had to rely solely on traditional funding sources. Guttman and Thomson have partnered to develop novel cell-profiling and cell-mapping methods that could illuminate the nature of gene-protein interactions that lead to cancer or infectious diseases. Guttman and Voorhees have collaborated to study the interactions between SARS CoV-2 and human ribosomes, and are now applying their insights to better understand the coronavirus’s processes for overtaking host cells. This research holds the potential for the development of a treatment for COVID-19.
The Heritage Research Institute for the Advancement of Medicine and Science at Caltech, through which HMRI investigators are appointed, was established by Caltech senior trustee and Associates member Richard Merkin, founder and chief executive officer of the Heritage Provider Network. At Caltech, in addition to supporting scientific and technological advancements in the life sciences for the betterment of human health, Merkin has created professorships in mathematical finance and mathematics.
(Slide the arrows below to reveal the instruments.)
Of the thousands of planets that have been confirmed to exist outside our solar system, nearly all were discovered indirectly via methods such as watching a star’s light dim as planets pass in front of it. Just over 50 exoplanets have had their pictures taken. Caltech astronomer Dimitri Mawet ultimately aims to directly image and analyze Earth-like planets. With support from sources including Break Through campaign gifts from the Heising-Simons Foundation, Mawet leads development of the Keck Planet Imager and Characterizer (KPIC), a package of instruments and upgrades for the Keck II telescope in Hawaii that is being installed in phases, with some devices already operational.
The tools help the telescope suppress the overpowering light from host stars that makes it difficult to detect and examine planets, correct for distortion from Earth’s atmosphere, and observe infrared light at high angular and spectral resolution to help astronomers learn about planetary atmospheres and other characteristics. As a first step, Mawet’s group uses the instruments to look at large gas giant planets. With future instruments, he plans to move on to smaller, harder-to-see Earth-sized worlds.
How does KPIC work? Infrared light coming from a star and its planets bounces through the giant telescope, reflecting off three mirrors to reach a small clean room that contains the Keck adaptive optics and the KPIC instrument. The device pictured above, currently under development at Caltech, illustrates the second-generation implementation of KPIC and will be part of a suite of instruments that splits the beam of light in two, directing one part to a high-contrast infrared camera that makes planetary pictures and the other through a fiber to a high-resolution spectrograph. The spectrograph is a tool that separates light by wavelengths, giving Mawet and other astronomers clues to the chemicals present on the planet and their relative abundances, information from which a surprising number of planetary characteristics can be derived. In its first science results, unveiled in July, KPIC revealed the length of the days and chemical compositions of four planets orbiting a star 133 light-years away.
Dimitri Mawet is a Caltech professor of astronomy and a research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which Caltech manages for NASA.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in three patients who dies in a hospital has sepsis, a condition in which the body’s fight against an infection damages tissues and organs. The odds of surviving severe sepsis improve if physicians can prescribe precisely targeted medicines quickly, but doctors often need to start patients on broad-spectrum antibiotics that counter a wide swath of bacteria while they wait days for blood cultures to identify which microbes a patient is fighting.
Researchers at Caltech want to give physicians the best possible information as quickly as possible. Rustem Ismagilov’s research group has been pioneering high-speed digital detection techniques to rapidly identify the infectious microbes, but their new methods require concentrated samples of those microbes. Two Caltech laboratories—one led by Katherine Faber and the other by Julia Kornfield—have teamed up to make that possible. With a grant from the Rothenberg Innovation Initiative, a program created during the Break Through campaign to support research that might lead to new and marketable technologies, the researchers invented a tool that can collect pathogens from a blood sample in large numbers. The device is a ceramic membrane riddled with tunnels and chambers whose shapes, sizes, and arrangements allow blood cells to flow through but force the much tinier bacteria to swirl away into side chambers, trapped for later identification.
Julia A. Kornfield (BS ’83) is Caltech’s Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor of Chemical Engineering. Katherine Faber is the Simon Ramo Professor of Materials Science. Rustem Ismagilov is the Ethel Wilson Bowles and Robert Bowles Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, as well as director of the Jacobs Institute for Molecular Engineering for Medicine.
Quantum computers, which use the principles of quantum mechanics to perform computations beyond the reach of classic computing, are beginning to become a reality now that working prototypes exist. However, researchers are eager to connect future quantum computers in quantum networks that could solve problems too big for one machine alone. For instance, quantum networks could enable a new method of cryptography in which the secrecy of any communication is protected by the laws of physics. Or, one day, networked quantum sensors could spur out-of-this-world technologies by allowing groups of telescopes to process light in perfect synchrony, essentially working as a single telescope to see deep into the primordial and potentially lively universe.
One major hurdle to such networks is that quantum entanglement—the fundamental physical phenomenon that explains how multiple photons of light or other tiny particles can remain linked even when separated and which underpins quantum networks—could break if distributed 100 miles over noisy fiber-optic cables.
To address this issue, Caltech’s Andrei Faraon has developed essential components for future quantum repeater networks. The tiny photonic cavity can serve as a network node that will extend the range of quantum communication. The device is a 10-micron-long patterned crystal rod with an ytterbium ion tucked into its center. The ion “absorbs and emits photons of light in exactly the way needed to create a quantum network,” says Faraon. His work is supported by Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM), which has been given new flexibility to support innovative projects by discretionary funds included in campaign gifts such as a Davis Leadership Chair.
Andrei Faraon (BS ’04) is a Caltech professor of applied physics and electrical engineering.
Caltech researchers in the laboratory of Pamela Björkman have long used advanced imaging techniques to study the antibodies the human body creates in response to a virus like HIV and to determine what strategies those antibodies employ to thwart invaders. An urgent new focus for their work arose when SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic, spread around the world.
In 2020, a team from the Björkman laboratory, led by then-postdoctoral scholar Christopher Barnes, set out to find antibodies that fight SARS-CoV-2 to see how they attach to the virus. They did this by creating electron microscope images of antibodies isolated from the blood plasma of people who had recovered from COVID-19. The antibodies were bound to the SARS-CoV-2 spike, the target of neutralizing antibodies. This was no mean feat: their study marked the first time scientists had imaged a mixture of antibodies purified from human blood after a viral infection and then used those images to visualize the antibodies attaching to a protein on the surface of the virus.
To study antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2, the researchers performed two types of electron microscopy in the Caltech Cryo-EM facility, located within the Beckman Institute: one to determine how well mixtures of COVID antibodies in recovered patients recognize the “spike” protein that SARS-CoV-2 uses to latch onto healthy cells, and another involving single-particle cryo-EM to see the exact structure of the antibodies when they are bound to the spike protein.
Pamela Björkman is the David Baltimore Professor of Biology and Bioengineering and executive officer for biology and biological engineering. Recently, Christopher Barnes joined Stanford University as an assistant professor of biology.
Methane is one of the most important anthropogenic greenhouse gases, second only to carbon dioxide. Yet it is far more difficult to track than CO2. Whereas major CO2 emitters include easy-to-measure sources such as coal plants, the biggest methane emitters include landfills, leaky natural gas pipelines, and even bovine belches (the result of fermenting vegetable matter inside cow stomachs). It is tricky to estimate the exact emissions from such mobile, ephemeral, or difficult-to-locate sources, so researchers scan the ground from the skies. Such efforts are important because better data about methane sources is crucial to efforts at mitigating climate change.
To detect and measure methane plumes in high resolution, JPL researchers developed a tool called the Next Generation Airborne Visible-Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS-NG) that flies on board a small airplane. However, because wind can blow methane away from its source and surface properties can interfere with the methane retrievals, the scientists still have struggled to connect with certainty the detected plumes to their origins and to quantify their emission rates. The problem inspired Siraput Jongaramrungruang, a Resnick Sustainability Institute (RSI) Fellow, to develop a helpful algorithm, which he outlined in 2019 and 2021 studies. Jongaramrungruang’s tool can assess the shape and physical characteristics of mapped methane plumes, allowing researchers to identify and quantify the source of methane without the need for extra information on local wind speed.
Siraput Jongaramrungruang is a Resnick Fellow and a graduate student in the laboratory of Christian Frankenberg, professor of environmental science and engineering and JPL research scientist.
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