Four Caltech professors—Harry Atwater, Mory Gharib (PhD '83), Robert Grubbs, and Guruswami (Ravi) Ravichandran—have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), an honor considered among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. The academy welcomed 67 new American members and 12 foreign members this year. Included among the new class are also four Caltech alumni: Dana Powers (BS '70, PhD '75), Michael Tsapatsis (MS '91, PhD '94), Vigor Yang (PhD '84), and Ajit Yoganathan (PhD '78).

Harry Atwater, the Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science and director of the Resnick Sustainability Institute, was cited for his contributions to plasmonics—the study of plasmons, coordinated waves of electrons on the surfaces of metals. Atwater is developing plasmonic devices for controlling light on a nanometer scale. Such devices could be important for the eventual creation of quantum computers and more efficient photovoltaic cells in solar panels.

Mory Gharib is the vice provost for research and the Hans W. Liepmann Professor of Aeronautics and Bioinspired Engineering. His election citation notes his contributions to fluid flow visualization techniques and the engineering of bioinspired medical devices. Gharib's biomechanical studies are often coupled with medical engineering; for example, by studying the fluid dynamics of the human cardiovascular system, he and his group are better able to develop new types of prosthetic heart valves.

Robert Grubbs, the Victor and Elizabeth Atkins Professor of Chemistry and corecipient of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, was elected for the development of catalysts that have enabled commercial products. For example, Grubbs and his team developed a new method for synthesizing organosilanes—basic chemical building blocks. Normally these molecules are made with expensive and rare precious metals, but Grubbs's group has found a way to catalyze the reaction using a cheap and abundant potassium compound.

Guruswami (Ravi) Ravichandran is the John E. Goode, Jr., Professor of Aerospace, professor of mechanical engineering, and director of the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories (GALCIT). He is cited by the NAE for his contributions to the mechanics of dynamic deformation, damage, and failure of engineering materials. Ravichandran has studied the behavior of polymers under high pressures and strains, and how the peeling of an adhesive material—like Scotch Tape—may be modeled as a crack propagating in a medium.

Atwater, Gharib, Grubbs, and Ravichandran join 41 other Caltech faculty and trustees as elected members of the NAE.

Just days after shaking off a 55-game conference losing streak, the Caltech men's basketball team accomplished something it had not in 44 years—two Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SCIAC) wins in one season—with a 92–77 victory over Whittier College on Saturday, February 7.

Their first win of the season—and first conference victory since February 22, 2011, when the team broke a 310-game conference losing streak—came Tuesday, February 3, against the University of Redlands, after a game-winning basket at the buzzer.

"It was an amazing, unprecedented week for basketball and Caltech athletics. Our team continues to progress and the effort each player and coach puts into our program translated into two huge wins," says head basketball coach Oliver Eslinger. "We thank our fans and community for the energy they brought to Braun. There's more to come!"

The men's team last won two conference games in the 1970–71 season. The last set of back-to-back conference wins occurred 61 years ago, in the 1953–54 season, when the team won three straight conference games to claim the SCIAC Championship. Caltech also recorded consecutive SCIAC victories during the 1960–61, 1959–60, and 1958–59 seasons, although in each case there was a nonconference loss between the two winning conference games.

The team will next face off against Claremont-Mudd-Scripps on Thursday, February 12, at the Rains Center on the Pomona College campus. Tip-off is at 7:30 p.m.

Learn more about Caltech athletics at http://www.gocaltech.com/.

Imagine you have an idea for a new object—say, a custom phone case that perfectly molds to your hand or a cupholder that attaches to your laptop. Then, an hour later, a tangible plastic version of that item materializes just a few feet away, right in your living room. This scenario might sound a bit futuristic, but New Matter, a company founded by Caltech alum Steve Schell (BS '01), is determined to make affordable, at-home 3-D printing a reality in the present.

The Caltech women's basketball team broke a 5-year, 64-game conference losing streak with a 59–58 win over the University of La Verne on Wednesday, February 18.

The win caps a banner week for Caltech basketball, as the men's team notched its third straight home SCIAC win with a 70–69 victory over La Verne on February 17. The men's three SCIAC wins are the most in a single season since 1960–61, when the Beavers topped four conference foes, and equal the total number of SCIAC wins over the previous 42 years.

Read more about the women's game and the men's game.

Both teams face off against Occidental College on Saturday, February 21, at Braun Gym, in their last home games of the season. The women tip-off at 5 p.m. and the men at 7 p.m.

Five Caltech faculty members have been named among the 2015 class of Sloan Research Fellows. The fellowships, awarded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, honor "early-career scientists whose achievements and potential identify them as rising stars, the next generation of scientific leaders." This year, 126 young scientists were awarded fellowships in eight scientific and technical fields: chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, computational and evolutionary biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences, and physics. Candidates must be nominated by a department head or other senior researcher and are reviewed by a selection committee of three distinguished scientists in each field.

Viviana Gradinaru (BS' 05), an assistant professor of biology and the faculty director of the Beckman Institute Pilot Center for Optogenetics and CLARITY, received her fellowship in the area of neuroscience. The CLARITY technique, codeveloped by Gradinaru, is used to render tissues, organs, and even whole organisms transparent. Her research focuses on developing tools and methods for neuroscience as well as investigating the mechanisms underlying deep brain stimulation and its long-term effects on neuronal health, function, and behavior.

Mitchell Guttman, an assistant professor of biology, received the fellowship in the category of computational and evolutionary molecular biology. His work exploring unknown regions of the genome has led to the identification of genes that do not produce proteins, known as long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs), which act as efficient administrators, gathering and organizing key proteins necessary for packaging genetic information and regulating gene expression. Guttman and his colleagues recently discovered that lncRNAs can shape chromosome structure to remodel the genome and pull in necessary target genes, unlike other proteins that must travel to their targets.

Gregg Hallinan, an assistant professor of astronomy, received his fellowship in the physics category. His group studies the universe at radio wavelengths, particularly examining the radio emissions produced by stars and their planets. His team recently completed construction of a new radio telescope at Caltech's Owens Valley Radio Observatory that can survey the entire sky instantaneously. This project aims to deliver the first detection of radio waves produced by the interaction of the magnetic field of an exoplanet—a planet outside our own solar system—with the stellar wind of its host star.

Heather Knutson, an assistant professor of planetary science, received the fellowship in the physics category. She studies the structure, chemistry, and atmospheric dynamics of extrasolar planets. These planets are often classified into broad categories based on their mass and radius. Knutson's research measuring exoplanet temperatures and characterizing atmospheric compositions adds detail to these classifications. She has helped develop many of the techniques that are now used to study exoplanet atmospheric dynamics.

Xinwen Zhu, an associate professor of mathematics, received the fellowship in the mathematics category. His research interests focus on geometric representation theory, in particular the geometric aspects of the Langlands program, a kind of "unified theory of mathematics" linking together many different mathematical fields of research. This research aims to provide a more intuitive visualization of prime numbers by relating the field to diverse topics such as geometry and quantum physics.

Also included among this year's class of fellows are six other Caltech alumni: Brandi Cossairt (BS '06), Jennifer A. Dionne (MS '05, PhD '09), Aaron Esser-Kahn (BS '04), Michael Kesden (PhD '05), Neal Mankad (PhD '10), and Stephanie Waterman (MS '02).

Senior Connie Hsueh, a physics major, has been awarded a 2015 Gates Cambridge Scholarship that will fund graduate studies at the University of Cambridge. She is the seventh Caltech undergraduate student to receive this award. 

The Gates Cambridge Scholarship program, established in 2000 through a donation to Cambridge University from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, recognizes young people from around the world who not only excel academically, but also display a commitment to social issues and bettering the world. Hsueh and the 39 other American recipients were selected from a pool of 755 applicants competing for this year's U.S. award. In April, 55 international scholars, selected from a pool of around 3,000 applicants, will join Hsueh and her U.S. colleagues as Gates Cambridge Scholars.

A native Californian, and the only student in this year's U.S. applicant pool to win a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to study physics, Hsueh will use her scholarship to pursue an MPhil in physics. She will use computational and theoretical techniques to investigate novel battery materials—an interest that began for her while doing experimental work with batteries at Caltech in the laboratory of Brent Fultz, Barbara and Stanley R. Rawn, Jr., Professor of Materials Science and Applied Physics.

"The summer after my sophomore year, I investigated the electronic properties of lithium-ion rechargeable batteries in Professor Fultz's lab," Hsueh says. "I think it's incredible that through a variety of spectroscopic techniques, we can explain how materials behave at the atomic level. That we have the ability to probe materials on these scales—so many orders of magnitude smaller than what we physically deal with—is what astounds and interests me about physics. In addition," she adds, "Professor Fultz has been an incredibly supportive advisor and friend to me as I have tried to figure out what I want to do with my life."

A student with varied research interests, Hsueh spent her first summer at Caltech investigating novel HIV diagnostics as part of a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) project in the laboratory of Jim Heath, the Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor and professor of chemistry. In 2014, she completed a summer internship at Lockheed Martin, where she gained experience in computer modeling and experimental research for defense-related technologies.

While at Caltech, Hsueh also kept a busy schedule outside of the laboratory and the classroom, serving two terms as the director of operations of the Associated Students of the California Institute of Technology (ASCIT) board of directors, four seasons on the Caltech volleyball team, and three seasons on the water polo team. Surprised that there was no physics club for students, Hsueh co-founded the Caltech Physics Club to give interested students a place to explore physics topics outside of the classroom.

Hsueh, who is currently studying abroad at Cambridge as a participant in Caltech's undergraduate exchange, the Cambridge Scholars Program, "is an outstanding student and human being," says Lauren Stolper, director of the Fellowships Advising and Study Abroad Office and the Career Development Center. "Connie has invested herself in her Caltech education and always considers how she can help her peers academically or by bettering extracurricular opportunities for them. She will be an excellent representative for Caltech as a Gates Cambridge Scholar," Stolper adds.

After Cambridge, Hsueh would like to continue to pursue an academic career and, one day, become a professor. However, this pursuit is not her only goal.

"It's always been my ambition to improve society and do good in the world. What that means exactly is still up in the air—maybe it will mean encouraging and mentoring future generations, or maybe it will mean inventing a life-changing device that completely revolutionizes the world," she says. "I'm honored to join the community of Gates Cambridge Scholars because I believe that they share this passion for improving the world, and I hope that we will support one another in this mission."

The last time that Mel Levet squared off against Occidental College in a baseball game, Franklin Roosevelt was in his second term as the nation's president and Gone with the Wind had just won the Oscar for best picture.

Now 97, Levet returned to campus last Friday to throw out the first pitch for Caltech against Oxy.

"I haven't pitched a baseball in 65 years," Levet said. "This is pretty exciting."

Family, friends, and members of the Caltech community turned out to celebrate. "This has blossomed into a great day for Caltech baseball and for Caltech. We're delighted to welcome Mel home," said Matt Mark, the Beavers' head baseball coach.

Levet attended Caltech from 1935 through 1940, earning his bachelor's and master's degrees in geology. He fondly recalls studying under Ian Campbell, who later became the geologist for the state of California. "One minute, I would be in a final having to identify minerals from the 200 or so in Caltech's collection," said Levet. "The next, I'd be running out to the baseball field. It was a wonderful time."

During his three years on the varsity squad, Levet led teams to 15 wins—including a 2–0 shutout of Occidental College in his final season. Levet became team captain his senior year, then coached the freshmen while earning his master's degree. In 1938, the Caltech baseball team recognized Levet's accomplishments with their most prestigious honor, the Rawlings Trophy.

"I made a vow to myself when I joined Caltech's baseball team: that I would become captain, and that I would win the Rawlings," said Levet. "I'm proud to say I did both."

World War II broke out not long after Levet's graduation, and he enlisted with the United States Army Air Forces, joining their burgeoning meteorology program. He held posts in numerous locations across the Pacific, including the Solomon Islands and Japan. After the war, Levet worked for several oil companies, including Chevron Corporation, where he spent the majority of his career as a research geologist. He retired from the company in 1982.

"In work and in life, my father has always been deeply curious," said Levet's daughter, Jan Le Pouvir, while she sat in the bleachers with Levet's family after the pitch. "He never stops asking questions. That inquisitiveness comes from Caltech. And in a way, I think it's the secret to his long life."

"Throughout his athletic career here, Mel displayed the qualities of ability, sportsmanship, and character that are hallmarks of the Caltech athlete," said Betsy Mitchell, director of athletics, recreation, and physical education at Caltech. "We're thrilled that Mel is still connected to Caltech and that he is able to share with our student athletes the lessons and memories he took with him from here into life."

Levet did not get to relish a win on Friday—Occidental bested the Beavers, 11–1—but he did not seem to mind. "A lot has changed, but the core of Caltech and its students is all just as I remember. It's a remarkable institution," he said. "I'd love to come back and get my PhD."

Written by Ben Tomlin

Caltech has announced that Kip S. Thorne (BS '62), David D. Ho (BS '74), Quynh-Thu Xuan Le (BS '89), and Stanislav Smirnov (MS '95, PhD '96) are this year's recipients of the Distinguished Alumni Award.

First presented in 1966, the award is the highest honor the Institute bestows upon its graduates. It is awarded in recognition of a particular achievement of noteworthy value, a series of such achievements, or a career of noteworthy accomplishment.

The 2015 Distinguished Alumni Award recipients are

Kip S. Thorne (BS '62, Physics)
Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus, Caltech
Thorne is being recognized for his contributions to gravitational physics and astrophysics; his mentorship of physics students, many of whom have become leaders in their fields; and for helping to increase the awareness of science through books and film.

David D. Ho (BS '74, Biology)
Director and Chief Executive Officer, Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center
Irene Diamond Professor, The Rockefeller University
Ho is being recognized for his positive impact on human health. His studies have elucidated the dynamic nature of HIV replication in infected persons, forming the foundation for combination antiretroviral therapy. This therapy protocol has led to reductions in AIDS-associated mortality in developed countries.

Quynh-Thu Xuan Le (BS '89, Biology and Chemistry)
Katharine Dexter McCormick and Stanley McCormick Memorial Professor
Professor and Chair, Department of Radiation Oncology, Stanford University
Le is being recognized for her contributions to the development of new radiotherapy treatment paradigms for cancer of the head, neck, and lungs, and for her leadership in medicine on prominent national panels and as chair of the Department of Radiation Oncology at Stanford University.

Stanislav Smirnov (MS '95, PhD '96, Mathematics)
Professor of Mathematics, University of Geneva;
Director of SwissMAP, National Center for Competence in Research
Smirnov is being recognized for his achievements in mathematics, particularly in statistical physics. He produced the first rigorous proofs of conformal invariance in lattice models, a discovery that has opened new directions in probability theory.

In one of the largest acts of philanthropy in Caltech's history, Ron (MS '62, PhD '64) and Maxine Linde have pledged at least $50 million to the Institute.

Their gift, structured to provide Caltech with flexibility to address emerging priorities, creates an endowment without a specific permanent designation. In this way, the Lindes' newest contribution, like many of the couple's previous gifts to Caltech, is earmarked to advance promising initiatives in their early stages. Once those initiatives are well established and positioned to garner additional external support, the endowed funds can be redirected to "the next important project Caltech should be undertaking," as Ron Linde describes it.

"The Lindes' exceptional generosity will have a far-reaching and enduring impact on Caltech," says President Thomas F. Rosenbaum, holder of Caltech's Sonja and William Davidow Presidential Chair and professor of physics. "They understand deeply the Institute's fundamental values and appetite for bold research endeavors. The Lindes' remarkable gift is an evocative endorsement of our community of scholars and the contributions they make to science, technology, and society, geared to the future."

The focus on tomorrow is a key element of the Lindes' unusual brand of philanthropy, whose built-in flexibility is expressly aimed at empowering Caltech to adapt to the unknown. "Our philosophy is to allow for flexibility because you can't know the future," Ron Linde says, "and science is about exploring the unknown."

The couple's connection to Caltech reaches back more than 50 years, to Ron Linde's time as a graduate student who earned the Institute's first doctorate in materials science. Maxine Linde, a mathematician, worked as a scientific programmer at the Caltech-managed Jet Propulsion Laboratory during the early days of the U.S. space program.

Ron Linde was elected to the Institute's Board of Trustees in 1989 and has involved himself deeply in Institute governance. Now a senior trustee and vice chair of Caltech's board of trustees, he serves on eight committees and subcommittees of the board. The Lindes have provided substantial financial support to the Institute over the past 25 years, making several multimillion-dollar gifts.

"Our giving is not just a matter of loyalty," Ron Linde says. "We measure the success of our philanthropic investments by the impact achieved per dollar spent. Caltech's long track record speaks for itself. A dollar invested in Caltech can provide unparalleled returns."

Adds Maxine Linde, "As informed investors, we see Caltech as the best opportunity we will ever encounter to have a significant, lasting, personal impact on the world."

Partners in life and in business, Ron and Maxine Linde are chairman and president, respectively, of The Ronald and Maxine Linde Foundation. Ron previously was founder, chairman, and CEO of Envirodyne Industries Inc., a company where Maxine served as general counsel and chief administrative officer.

As philanthropists, the Lindes have supported a wide range of Institute priorities over the years, and the imprint of their generosity is evident across campus. One of their gifts helped establish the cross-divisional Ronald and Maxine Linde Center for Global Environmental Science and aided in refurbishing its campus home, the Linde + Robinson Laboratory. Another contribution helped create the interdisciplinary Ronald and Maxine Linde Institute of Economic and Management Sciences. A faculty chair the couple endowed has migrated across fields to meet Caltech's needs as it has changed occupants over the years. The chair is currently held by Alexei Kitaev, the Institute's Ronald and Maxine Linde Professor of Theoretical Physics and Mathematics and inaugural winner of Yuri Milner's Fundamental Physics Prize. A challenge grant from the Lindes made possible the Ronald and Maxine Linde/Caltech Alumni Laboratories at the Institute's Broad Center for Biological Sciences. Other Linde gifts have supported specific research programs.

"Through their exceptional approach to philanthropy, Ron and Maxine help us to address our most fundamental need—to stimulate and support in perpetuity boldness and creativity in our faculty and students," says Provost Edward M. Stolper, holder of the Carl and Shirley Larson Provostial Chair and William E. Leonhard Professor of Geology. "And it has paid off in helping to retain and recruit outstanding professors, expanding the educational horizons of our students, and enabling the Institute to move in new directions. We turn to the Lindes with needs and opportunities that are at the core of what distinguishes Caltech, yet are the most difficult for which to raise funds. They then dig in and help us craft solutions that address these needs and opportunities. I want to emphasize how rare are partners of this sort and how lucky we at Caltech are to count Ron and Maxine among our friends and supporters."

The Lindes' latest and largest commitment was made in the hope that it would both advance key Institute priorities and motivate others to follow their lead.

"In addition to the dollars we put in, we are confident of Caltech's ability to leverage our investment to find further support down the line," Ron Linde says. "This gift is not an end in itself. It's more of a beginning."

Other Institute leaders agree that the Lindes' vote of confidence may have a multiplier effect.

"In their energetic engagement with the Institute, Ron and Maxine are an inspiration to the entire board and to me personally," says David Lee (PhD '74), chair of Caltech's board of trustees. "They know this place so well, and see so clearly the ways in which their giving can do the most for Caltech. When leaders like the Lindes choose to expand upon their past support, others will take notice and be inspired to make their own commitments."

Because the principal of their gift will remain part of the Institute's permanent endowment, generating annual payout to supply programmatic funding, the Lindes are creating a lasting legacy at Caltech. According to Ron Linde, that impact over the years to come is one attractive element of their contribution.

"The most important impact is the impact we can't even imagine yet," he says. "It's very exciting to help Caltech create the future, to provide support for things that are going to be happening centuries from now."

The Lindes also describe their historic contribution as a sign of their belief in the entire Caltech community and its continuing ability to create knowledge that changes the world.

"Ultimately we're betting on people—both on the people at Caltech today and on the future generations that Caltech will be able to attract," says Maxine Linde.

Rob Anderson, a junior on the Caltech men's basketball team, has been named to the 2015 Allstate National Association of Basketball Coaches Good Works Team. The community service award "honors student-athletes for their off-the-court achievements and commitment to giving back to their communities and positively impacting the lives of those around them," according to the NABC.

"I learned that I was named to the team at 8:30 a.m. after pulling an all-nighter, so it didn't really hit me at first," Anderson says. "I feel extremely honored to represent Caltech and our team on a national scale."

Anderson, who is studying mechanical engineering and business economics and management, was selected for his extensive work researching and designing sustainable energy projects. During his senior year of high school, he designed a 17-foot solar-powered boat for the 2012 Solar Splash Competition. Upon his arrival at Caltech in the fall of 2012, he joined both the basketball team and the Institute's 2013 Department of Energy Solar Decathlon team, which collaborated with architectural design students from the Southern California Institute of Architecture to design, build, and operate a solar-powered house.

During the summer of 2013, Anderson returned to his home state to conduct research at the University of Minnesota, where he designed and coded a tool to calculate the economic feasibility of growing crops that could be converted to fuel in the form of cellulosic ethanol.

"After the Solar Decathlon ended in autumn of 2013, I began looking for another engineering sustainability project," Anderson says. "I noticed there were a few empty gas-engine go-karts in Fleming [one of Caltech's eight undergraduate houses] and I realized I could re-engineer them to use electric power."

Anderson reached out to Caltech and the Resnick Sustainability Institute, and proposed repairing the vehicles, one using battery power and another using a hydrogen fuel cell. He also reached out to the undergraduate population to gauge interest in a sustainable vehicle club. Eventually, more than 100 students signed up for the club's mailing list.

"That's basically how the Sustainable Vehicle Club was born," Anderson says. "The people at the Resnick Institute were excited that a student wanted to lead an engineering project around sustainability. They have played a key role in advising the club, connecting us with the right people around campus and in the corporate world, and have been our main source of funding for purchasing the parts we need."

"Now we're using the old go-kart shells to experiment with drivetrains—the components that deliver power to the driving wheels—and battery systems. We're working with local companies to gather most of the parts." Anderson and his team aim to enter the 2016 Society of Automotive Engineers Formula One Electric Race, an electric vehicle design competition for college engineers.

In addition to design and engineering, Anderson and his group conduct research into the feasibility and efficiency of fuel cells.

"In general, sustainable energy can go either the electric route or the fuel cell route. We're analyzing both systems with respect to these go-karts to figure out their overall energy efficiency."

Engineering the go-karts to run on sustainable energy is still a long-term process. In the more immediate future, Anderson will soon be traveling to attend the NCAA Division I "Final Four" college basketball playoffs with other student-athletes on the NABC's Good Works team. Later in the year, the team will also participate in a community works project and hold a basketball camp for younger players.

"Rob epitomizes the term student-athlete," says head basketball coach Oliver Eslinger. "His character and commitment, both as an academic standout and teammate, are highly valued in our program. He is a perfect representative for athletics and our university, in that he brings efficiency, creativity, and focus to his daily activities. We are so proud of this honor and what it means for Caltech. I know that the folks he meets during Final Four weekend will be impressed with his efforts and abilities to balance basketball with all of his research and academic pursuits."

For one week at the end of March, 32 students from 20 universities and 14 countries came to Caltech for an intensive training experience in space mission design: the Caltech Space Challenge. Organizers hand-selected the undergraduate and graduate students from a pool of 220 applicants and created two "dream teams" of engineers, scientists, and designers to face off in a competition to see who could design the best mission.

This year, the teams—Team Explorer and Team Voyager—were tasked with designing a manned mission to an asteroid placed in orbit around the moon. Aside from determining details such as the best type of vehicle to use, the optimal launch date, and how to keep the astronauts safe, each team was asked to explain how its mission would explore and make use of the asteroid to enable future missions to more distant locales, such as Mars.

The Space Challenge takes place at Caltech every two years. For the inaugural challenge in 2011, participants designed a manned mission to a near-Earth asteroid. Two years later, the challenge involved planning a mission to one of Mars's moons.

This year, organizers based the challenge on NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), proposed for launch in 2020. The concept of that mission is to send a robotic spacecraft to a near-Earth asteroid, have it remove a large boulder from the asteroid's surface, and then move it into a lunar orbit. A version of a mission originally considered by the Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) at Caltech, NASA's ARM is part of a larger strategy to use asteroids as a stepping-stone to manned missions to Mars and beyond.

"KISS came up with this idea to redirect an asteroid and bring it here as a way to fulfill President Obama's vision of people going to an asteroid by 2025," explains Hayden Burgoyne, a graduate student in space engineering at Caltech and one of two student lead organizers for this year's challenge. "Basically, they said, 'It's hard to send people to an asteroid; it's easier to bring an asteroid to us.' But people are looking toward the end goal of Mars, and they want to know how the Asteroid Redirect Mission will help us get there. So we framed this challenge as a resource utilization challenge to show how this resource that they bring back—this asteroid—can be used to benefit future human exploration."

Throughout the week, the students attended lectures delivered by scientists and engineers from JPL and the aerospace industry on topics related to the challenge, such as mission formulation, human space exploration, asteroid mining, and chemical propulsion. They were also able to consult with mentors working in related fields who were available to help the teams troubleshoot.

"Basically, we brought together the best of the best," says Niccolo Cymbalist, a graduate student in aeronautics at Caltech and the event's other student lead organizer. "But one of the neat things is that the students had the opportunity to interact with sort of their future selves. The speakers and mentors who came in from JPL and from industry are also at the top of their fields, and many participants from previous years have gone on to work in space-related fields."

This year, the teams also had the opportunity to complete a half-day formalized study with a group in the Innovation Foundry at JPL, known as the A-Team. These JPL scientists and engineers help explore, develop, and evaluate early mission concepts and were able to advise the students on science, implementation, and programmatic elements of their respective missions.

At the end of the week, both teams turned in written reports and presented their mission concepts to an audience that included jurors from Caltech, JPL, the Planetary Society, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, SpaceX, and Millennium Space Systems.

In their mission plans, both groups opted to use two rockets—one to launch scientific cargo and another at a later date to deliver the crew. They also both decided that three astronauts would be optimal for this mission.

Beyond those similarities, though, the two teams had quite different approaches to the challenge. Team Explorer had the idea to use an autonomous swarm of robots to characterize the topology of the asteroid and to collect samples both at the surface and at depth, using a specially designed chamber to extract volatiles. They planned to purify water found on the asteroid, demonstrating that it could be used in a variety of ways, including to water a lettuce garden—something that might capture the attention of the general public. The mission would also determine whether the asteroid could be used as a resource depot for other missions, or as part of the Deep Space Network to help facilitate communication between Earth and operating spacecraft.

In contrast, Team Voyager planned to join their mission's cargo and crew vehicles with an inflatable habitat brought along as cargo once their astronauts reached the asteroid. The astronauts would then spend five days using a robotic arm to drill and to conduct seismic surveys as they determined whether it was safe to explore the asteroid further. They also would bring a suite of scientific instruments with them, including a device to extract oxygen, hydrogen, and methanol from the asteroid, and they would collect and return samples to Earth from the asteroid's subsurface core. Team Voyager's plan for engaging the public included social media and a live feed from a 3-D HD 360-degree camera mounted on an astronaut's helmet.

The organizers say both teams presented outstanding missions. "I was blown away by the quality of the work that the students produced," says Burgoyne.

The final results were presented at a closing reception and banquet at the Athenaeum on March 27. In the end, Team Voyager came out slightly ahead of Team Explorer. According to the jury, the deciding factor was Team Voyager's presentation and success in turning their technically detailed report into a compelling story for the audience.

Alicia Lanz, a member of Team Voyager and a graduate student in physics at Caltech, says the best part of the experience was meeting and working with people from various parts of the world and with different scientific training. "It was so interesting to learn from people with different backgrounds and to see everyone work together to create a viable mission that was greater than anything a single individual could have contributed," she says. "The Caltech Space Challenge was an amazing opportunity."

The student technical lead for this year's Space Challenge was Jay Qi, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at Caltech. The faculty advisor was Beverley McKeon, professor of aeronautics at Caltech and associate director of the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories of the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT). Leon Alkalai of JPL was the program mentor. The Space Challenge is organized by GALCIT and supported by Caltech and its Division of Engineering and Applied Science, JPL, KISS, and corporate sponsors including Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, Millennium Space Systems, and AGI.

Caltech seniors Adam Jermyn and Charles Tschirhart have been named 2015 Hertz Fellowship winners. Selected from a pool of approximately 800 applicants, the awardees will receive up to five years of support for their graduate studies. According to the Hertz Foundation, fellows are chosen for their intellect, their ingenuity, and their potential to bring meaningful improvement to society. Jermyn and Tschirhart bring the number of Caltech undergraduate Hertz fellows to 60.

Adam Jermyn, a physics major from Longmeadow, Massachusetts, works with so-called "emergent phenomena," which "is a broad term referring to situations where we know all of the laws on a fundamental level but where there are so many pieces working together that the consequences aren't known," he says. For example, the basic laws governing fluid mechanics are simple equations that relate such easily measured quantities as density, velocity, and temperature to one another, but simulating the behavior of two gases as they mix in a turbulent flow can tax the capacity of a supercomputer.

Jermyn's senior thesis models how a pulsar—a type of celestial radio source that flashes as fast as a thousand times per second—disrupts the atmosphere of a companion star. Pulsars are neutron stars—supernova cinders that pack the mass of a couple of suns into a sphere roughly the size of Manhattan. The spin imparted by the supernova's explosion and equally violent collapse creates a beam of tightly focused radio waves. If a neutron star were "aimed" at Earth, the beam's fleeting illumination would register as a flash in our radio telescopes every time it swept across us. Meanwhile, the pulsar's intense gravity distorts the companion star, creating a bulge on its surface. Like Earth's moon, the star's rotation is tidally locked, always presenting the same side to its dominant neighbor. The companion star's atmosphere gets siphoned away, layer by layer, forming a turbulent tendril of gas that winds in an ever-tightening spiral around the pulsar as the stolen material accretes onto its surface.

Charles Tschirhart of Naperville, Illinois, is a double major in applied physics and chemistry. His interests lie at the opposite end of the scale—in the world of nanotechnology, where lengths are measured in nanometers, or billionths of a meter. In the summer of 2012, he was part of a team that built nanoelectrodes—tiny silicon needles that penetrate a cell wall without damaging the cell to monitor the electrical activity within.

Tschirhart and Jermyn share an interest in fluid mechanics. "I think the biggest difference between what Adam and I do is that he is a theorist, and I am an experimentalist," Tschirhart says. "Physicists pretend that a fluid is a continuum of infinitely divisible matter and thus doesn't have any 'graininess' to it." But because atoms and molecules do have finite sizes, "once you get down to small enough scales," he says, "even water becomes 'grainy.'" The fluid becomes more viscous, as it takes effort to force the grains past one another. For his senior thesis, Tschirhart determined the nanoviscosity of silicone oil by measuring the thickness of a thin film of oil, smearing it even thinner with a stream of air and measuring its thickness again. The thickness should decrease in a linear manner, but this doesn't happen when the layer gets thin enough. "These films aren't much thicker than the size of a molecule," he says. "This is where noncontinuum effects show up." These effects could affect how engineers approach tasks as diverse as lubricating hard drives and extracting crude oil from porous rocks.

Both students took Physics 11, a course taught by the late Professor Thomas Tombrello. Tombrello launched this class in 1989 to teach encourage freshman to think creatively, and taught it annually until his death in September 2014. This year, Jermyn and Tschirhart are helping teach it. "Physics 11 really shaped the way I ask questions, and I have Tom Tombrello to thank for that," says Jermyn. "He pushed us to think about things obliquely," Tschirhart concurs. "After I got over my initial nerves, I found myself enjoying [the two rounds of Hertz interviews], which made it much easier to answer the questions creatively."

Both plan to defer their Hertz doctoral fellowships while they take advanced degrees in England. Tschirhart will be attending the University of Nottingham as a Fulbright Scholar for one year, where he plans to develop new applications for atomic force microscopy, a powerful technique for "photographing" nanoscale objects. Jermyn will be at the University of Cambridge for two years as a Marshall Scholar investigating the processes by which planets form around binary star systems.

This year, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has selected 31 current Caltech students and 12 alumni to receive its Graduate Research Fellowships. The awards support three years of graduate study within a five-year fellowship period in research-based master's or doctoral programs in science or engineering.

The NSF notes that the Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) "is a critical program in NSF's overall strategy to develop the globally-engaged workforce necessary to ensure the nation's leadership in advancing science and engineering research and innovation."

Caltech's awardees for 2015 are seniors Bridget Connor, Boyu Fan, Mark Greenfield, Bryan He, Adam Jermyn, Robert F. Johnson, Ellen Price, Charles Tschirhart, Max Wang, Benjamin Wang, Caroline Werlang, Patrick Yiu, and Andy J. Zhou; and graduate students Louisa Avellar, Dawna Bagherian, Kevin Cherry, Rebecca Glaudell, Elizabeth Goldstein, Denise Grunenfelder, Nina Gu, Elizabeth Holman, Erik Jue, Kyle Metcalfe, Kelsey Poremba, Denise Schmitz, Rebekah Silva, Chanel Valiente, Grigor Varuzhanyan, Ryan Witkosky (also an alumnus), Emily Wyatt, and Nicole Xu. Caltech alumni in the 2015 class of Graduate Fellows are Karen Dowling, Melissa Hubisz, Pawel Latawiec, Laura Lindzey, Katja Luxem, Rocio Mercado, Bertrand Ottino-Loffler, David Sell, Benjamin Suslick, Jordan Theriot, Ryan Thorngren, and Matthew Voss.

In total this year, the NSF selected 2,000 GRFP recipients from a pool of 16,500 applicants. Caltech's Fellowships Advising & Study Abroad Office works with current students and recent Caltech graduates interested in applying for an NSF fellowship, sponsoring a panel discussion of previous winners each fall and offering one-on-one advising. 

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has elected five Caltech community members as academy fellows. They are faculty members Michael B. Elowitz, professor of biology and bioengineering and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Mory Gharib (PhD '83), Hans W. Liepmann Professor of Aeronautics and Bioinspired Engineering, director of the Ronald and Maxine Linde Institute of Economic and Management Sciences, and vice provost; and Linda C. Hsieh-Wilson, professor of chemistry; and Caltech trustees James Rothenberg and Maria Hummer-Tuttle. The American Academy is one of the nation's oldest honorary societies. Members are accomplished scholars and leaders representing diverse fields including academia, business, public affairs, the humanities, and the arts.

Michael B. Elowitz was noted for his work that "helped to initiate synthetic biology." Elowitz studies genetic circuits—interacting genes and proteins that enable cells to sense environmental conditions and to communicate. He and his group build simplified synthetic genetic circuits and study their effects in bacteria, yeast, and mammalian cells. He has received numerous honors in recognition of his work, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2007.

Mory Gharib and his group use nature's own design principles—apparent in fins, wings, blood vessels, and more—as inspiration for a myriad of inventions. They have studied fluid flows inside the zebrafish heart to develop efficient micropumps and more efficient artificial heart valves, and cactus spine to develop arrays of nanoneedles, based on carbon nanotubes, for painless drug delivery. Gharib holds nearly 100 patents, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2015.

Linda C. Hsieh-Wilson was noted for her pioneering work in the new fields of chemical glycobiology and chemical neurobiology. Her work combines organic chemistry and neurobiology in order to understand how carbohydrates contribute to fundamental brain processes such as cell growth and neuronal communication, neural development, and memory at the molecular level. She and her group discovered a means for suppressing tumor-cell growth by blocking the attachment of certain sugars to proteins, restricting delivery of certain carbohydrates to proteins within the tumor.

Maria Hummer-Tuttle, a lawyer, was a partner and chair of the management committee and co–managing partner of Manatt, Phelps and Phillips in Los Angeles. She currently serves on the boards of Caltech, the J. Paul Getty Trust, the W. M. Keck Foundation, the Suu Foundation, and the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies. Hummer-Tuttle is president of the Hummer Tuttle Foundation, serves on the advisory board of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School as well as on the program advisory committee of the Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands, and is a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Getty Conservation Institute Council.

Jim Rothenberg is chairman of the Capital Group Companies, Inc. In addition to his service on the Caltech board, he serves on the boards of Capital Research and Management Company, the Capital Group Companies, Inc., and American Funds Distributors, Inc. In addition, he is a portfolio counselor for the Growth Fund of America, as well as vice chairman of the Growth Fund of America and Fundamental Investors. A chartered financial analyst, he was named to the Harvard Corporation as the treasurer of Harvard University in 2004. He also serves as a director of Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena.

Elowitz, Gharib, and Hsieh-Wilson join 83 current Caltech faculty as members of the American Academy. Also included in this year's list are five alumni: Robert Cohen (MS '70, PhD '72), St. Laurent Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and codirector of the DuPont-MIT Alliance; Alexei Filippenko (PhD '84), professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley; Katherine Hayles (MS '69), professor of literature at Duke University; Michael Snyder (PhD'83), professor and chair of genetics at Stanford University; and Donald Truhlar (PhD '70), professor of chemistry at the University of Minnesota.

Founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock, and other scholar-patriots, the academy aims to serve the nation by cultivating "every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people." The academy has elected as fellows and foreign honorary members "leading thinkers and doers" from each generation, including George Washington and Ben Franklin in the 18th century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 19th, and Albert Einstein and Woodrow Wilson in the 20th.

A full list of new members is available on the academy website at https://www.amacad.org/content/members/members.aspx.

The new class will be inducted at a ceremony on October 10, 2015, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

One Caltech professor and three Caltech alumni have been elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The announcement was made Tuesday, April 28, in Washington D.C.

The Caltech faculty member elected to the Academy is Marianne Bronner, Albert Billings Ruddock Professor of Biology and Executive Officer for Neurobiology. Bronner is a developmental biologist whose studies focus on the cellular and molecular events underlying the formation, lineage, and migration of neural crest cells—early cells in vertebrate embryos that eventually give rise to a diverse range of cell types, from neurons to facial skeleton cells. In 2013, she was awarded the Conklin Award from the Society for Developmental Biology, and she currently serves as the editor in chief of Developmental Biology, the society's official journal. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2009) and presently serves on the scientific advisory board of the Sontag Foundation.

Bronner joins 75 current Caltech faculty and three trustees as members of the NAS. Also included in this year's new members are three Caltech alumni: Eric Betzig (BS '83), a Nobel laureate and group leader in physics at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus; Robert Schoelkopf (PhD '95), the Stirling Professor of Applied Physics and Physics at Yale; and William Ward (PhD '73), an institute scientist in the Department of Space Studies at the Southwest Research Institute.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private organization of scientists and engineers dedicated to the furtherance of science and its use for the general welfare. It was established in 1863 by a congressional act of incorporation signed by Abraham Lincoln that calls on the academy to act as an official adviser to the federal government, upon request, in any matter of science or technology.

A full list of new members is available on the academy website at: http://www.nasonline.org/news-and-multimedia/news/april-28-2015-NAS-Election.html

Caltech's Dining Services team was recently honored with a 2015 Loyal E. Horton Dining Award from the National Association of College and University Food Services, taking home a bronze award for its Midnight Madness event.

Held three times a year during finals week, Midnight Madness is a special event that Dining Services created to provide undergraduate students with an opportunity to relax and refuel with a late-night (or early morning) breakfast during these important academic periods. Leaders from Caltech's administration and student affairs teams are often called upon to help dish up the fun and the food.

"Seven years ago, we noticed that students were often in zombie mode during finals—staying up way too late, not eating, and definitely not having any fun, so we decided to organize our own study break for them," says Jon Webster, the senior director of Dining Services. "We have gotten more and more extreme with the event every year; this year, we turned off all the overhead lights and used strobe lights, desk lamps, and glow sticks to light the meal. We also had a disco ball and music…and it seemed, at least for a little while, the stress of finals was an afterthought for the students."

Caltech seniors Janani Mandayam Comar and Aaron Krupp have been named 2015 Thomas J. Watson Fellowship winners. Each fellowship is a grant of $30,000 awarded to seniors graduating from a selected group of colleges. According to the Watson Foundation's website, "Fellows conceive original projects, execute them outside of the United States for one year and embrace the ensuing journey. They decide where to go, who to meet and when to change course." Fifty fellows were selected from a pool of nearly 700 candidates.

Janani Mandayam Comar is a biology major from Downers Grove, Illinois. During her Watson year abroad, she will be using Bharatanatyam, a classic dance form from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, to reflect the experiences of various "outsider" communities. "Bharatanatyam was originally an exclusively female way of connecting with God," Comar says. "It was revived in the early 1900s as a way to tell stories through movement, and it is now danced by both men and women, and is no longer confined to Indian communities."

In Australia, Comar will be working with the transgender community, whose situation is in some ways mirrored by traditional Indian culture. "Hindu mythology has a lot of transgender elements although the subject is taboo in modern Indian society," she explains. In South Africa, home of the oldest expatriate Indian community in the world, Comar will investigate the role that Indian women played during apartheid, and in Malaysia, a country where human trafficking is still common, she will work with nongovernmental organizations that assist trafficked women in order to tell their stories. Finally, in Buenos Aires, she plans to join a studio teaching Bharatanatyam. "They're working in a foreign culture where it had not previously been appreciated," she says. "The situation has parallels to women's efforts to break into STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] fields, especially in male-dominated societies like Argentina."

Comar will be entering an MD/PhD program on her return to the United States and plans to become a physician-scientist, eventually as a professor at a medical school. 

Aaron Krupp of Needham, Massachusetts, is a mechanical engineering major. Over the next year, he will be working on low-tech projects to improve the quality of life on the most basic level at sites in India, Southeast Asia, and Nepal. In India, he plans to help manufacture durable roofing tiles out of recycled cardboard. He also will be working near refugee camps along the Thai-Myanmar border to help develop charcoal-based drinking-water filtration systems, and in Nepal, he will be assembling used bicycle parts into lever-driven, variable-torque all-terrain wheelchairs.

"I am getting involved in small components of projects that are already underway," says Krupp, who currently has no post-Watson plans. For example, the water filters are the product of a lab at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where Krupp worked last summer, and the off-roading wheelchairs are an MIT project that he first encountered in 2013 while working at a hospital in rural Haiti after the magnitude-7.0 earthquake. 

Just inside the Caltech Store stands a manually operated penny press. If not for its distinctive orange color scheme and the Millikan Library panorama across its lower half, it might have come from any tourist-trap gift shop. But it is here for a very specific reason: to fund a single Caltech tradition that dates back nearly a century—Ditch Day.

One morning each spring, the majority of the senior class disappears from campus, leaving behind materials and instructions for a day of challenge-filled adventures for the underclass students. Some activities, like unlocking a custom-made puzzle box, demand uninterrupted concentration; others, like laser tag, are more physical. But nearly all of them are funded by the seniors themselves.

"Every year, our seniors have been putting up their own money to create all these awesome challenges for the underclassmen," says class of 2014 copresident Samantha "Pixie" Piszkiewicz (BS '14). "They're footing the bill for things like bounce houses, high-tech remote-controlled robots, even skydiving. It can get expensive."

When her class chose to donate the penny press as their senior class gift, they added a stipulation that addresses the problem directly: profits from the press can only be used to help offset Ditch Day costs. In its first year of operation, the press has provided more than $2,000 of Ditch Day assistance to the class of 2015.

Piszkiewicz and class copresident Jesse Salomon (BS '14) shepherded the project through, although Piszkiewicz gives credit where it is due. "The idea originated with Nerissa Hoglen [BS '13], but her class didn't have time to tackle all the approvals and fund-raising," Salomon says. "After considering a few other suggestions, our senior reps unanimously decided to adopt it."

The concept evidently appealed to the Caltech community, with contributions coming in from seniors, staffers, faculty, alumni, other donors, dozens of underclass students, and even one prefrosh. Perry Radford of the Caltech Fund, who coordinates philanthropy among recent alumni and students, says she understands why: "A penny press provides an engaging way to generate ongoing funds, in a way that a bench or a plaque just can't."

Manufactured by the Penny Machine Company of Boulder, Colorado, the press became operational shortly after last year's commencement. Fifty-one cents—two quarters and a penny—plus a bit of torque on the foot-long crank produces a souvenir medallion with one of four images: Beckman Auditorium, the Caltech Athletics logo featuring Bucky Beaver, the Institute's wordmark (a stylized rendition of the word Caltech), or the Curiosity rover with JPL's logo.

"The people of Facilities have been superhero partners since the design and installation phases," says Jannah Maresh, director of the Caltech Fund, which is still accepting donations for the press. "So have the staff of the Caltech Store. For one thing, they've learned to keep plenty of spare change in the till."

Associate Professor of Astronomy Dimitri Mawet has joined Caltech from the Paranal Observatory in Chile, where he was a staff astronomer for the Very Large Telescope. After earning his PhD at the University of Liège, Belgium, in 2006, he was at JPL from 2007 to 2011—first as a NASA postdoctoral scholar and then as a research scientist.

Q: What do you do?

A: I study exoplanets, which are planets orbiting other stars. In particular, I'm developing technologies to view exoplanets directly and analyze their atmospheres. We're hunting for small, Earth-like planets where life might exist—in other words, planets that get just the right amount of heat to maintain water in its liquid state—but we're not there yet. For an exoplanet to be imaged right now, it has to be really big and really bright, which means it's very hot.

In order to be seen in the glare of its star, the planet has to be beyond a minimum angular separation called the inner working angle. Separations can also be expressed in astronomical units, or AUs, where one AU is the mean distance between the sun and Earth. Right now we can get down to about two AU—but only for giant planets. For example, we recently imaged Beta Pictoris and HR 8799. We didn't find anything at two AU in either star system, but we found that Beta Pictoris harbors a planet about eight times more massive than Jupiter orbiting at 9 AU. And we see a family of four planets in the five- to seven-Jupiters range that orbit from 14 to 68 AU around HR 8799. For comparison, Saturn is 9.5 AU from the sun, and Neptune is 30 AU.

Q: How can we narrow the working angle?

A: You either build an interferometer, which blends the light from two or more telescopes and "nulls out" the star, or you build a coronagraph, which blots out the star's light. Most coronagraphs block the star's image by putting a physical mask in the optical path. The laws of physics say their inner working angles can't be less than the so-called diffraction limit, and most coronagraphs work at three to five times that. However, when I was a grad student, I invented a coronagraph that works at the diffraction limit.

The key is that we don't use a physical mask. Instead, we create an "optical vortex" that expels the star's light from the instrument. Some of our vortex masks are made from liquid-crystal polymers, similar to your smartphone's display, except that the molecules are "frozen" into orientations that force light waves passing through the center of the mask to emerge in different phase states simultaneously. This is not something nature allows, so the light's energy is nulled out, creating a "dark hole."

If we point the telescope so the star's image lands exactly on the vortex, its light will be filtered out, but any light that's not perfectly centered on the vortex—such as light from the planets, or from a dust disk around the star—will be slightly off-axis and will go on through to the detector.

We're also pushing to overcome the enormous contrast ratio between the very bright star and the much dimmer planet. Getting down to the Earth-like regime requires a contrast ratio of 10 billion to 1, which is really huge. The best contrast ratios achieved on ground-based telescopes today are more like 1,000,000 to 1. So we need to pump it up by another factor of 10,000.

Even so, we can do a lot of comparative exoplanetology, studying any and all kinds of planets in as many star systems as we can. The variety of objects around other stars—and within our own solar system—is mind-boggling. We are discovering totally unexpected things.

Q: Such as?

A: Twenty years ago, people were surprised to discover hot Jupiters, which are huge, gaseous planets that orbit extremely close to their stars—as close as 0.04 AU, or one-tenth the distance between the sun and Mercury. We have nothing like them in our solar system. They were discovered indirectly, by the wobble they imparted to their star or the dimming of their star's light as the planet passed across the line of sight. But now, with high-contrast imaging, we can actually see—directly—systems of equally massive planets that orbit tens or even hundreds of AU's away from their stars, which is baffling.

Planets form within circumstellar disks of dust and gas, but these disks get very tenuous as you go farther from the star. So how did these planets form? One hypothesis is that they formed where we see them, and thus represent failed attempts to become multiple star systems. Another hypothesis is that they formed close to the star, where the disk is more massive, and eventually expelled one another by gravitational interactions.

We're trying to answer that question by starting at the outskirts of these planetary systems, looking for massive, hot planets in the early stages of formation, and then grind our way into the inner reaches of older planetary systems as we learn to reduce the working angle and deal with ever more daunting contrast ratios. Eventually, we will be able to trace the complete history of planetary formation.

Q: How can you figure out the history?

Once we see the planet, once we have its signal in our hands, so to speak, we can do all kinds of very cool measurements. We can measure its position, that's called astrometry; we can measure its brightness, which is photometry; and, if we have enough signal, we can sort the light into its wavelengths and do spectroscopy.

As you repeat the astrometry measurements over time, you resolve the planet's orbit by following its motion around its star. You can work out masses, calculate the system's stability. If you add the time axis to spectrophotometry, you can begin to track atmospheric features and measure the planet's rotation, which is even more amazing.

Soon we'll be able to do what we call Doppler imaging, which will allow us to actually map the surface of the planet. We'll be able to resolve planetary weather phenomena. That's already been done for brown dwarfs, which are easier to observe than exoplanets. The next generation of adaptive optics on really big telescopes like the Thirty Meter Telescope should get us down to planetary-mass objects.

That's why I'm so excited about high-contrast imaging, even though it's so very, very hard to do. Most of what we know about exoplanets has been inferred. Direct imaging will tell us so much more about exoplanets—what they are made out of and how they form, evolve, and interact with their surroundings.

Q: Growing up, did you always want to be an astronomer?

A: No. I wanted to get into space sciences—rockets, satellite testing, things like that. I grew up in Belgium and studied engineering at the University of Liège, which runs the European Space Agency's biggest testing facility, the Space Center of Liège. I had planned to do my master's thesis there, but there were no openings the year I got my diploma.

I was not considering a thesis in astronomy, but I nevertheless went back to campus, to the astrophysics department. I knew some of the professors because I had taken courses with them. One of them, Jean Surdej, suggested that I work on a concept called the Four-Quadrant Phase-Mask (FQPM) coronagraph, which had been invented by French astronomer Daniel Rouan. I had been a bit hopeless, thinking I would not find a project I would like, but Surdej changed my life that day.

The FQPM was one of the first coronagraphs designed for very-small-working-angle imaging of extrasolar planets. These devices performed well in the lab, but had not yet been adapted for use on telescopes. Jean, and later on Daniel, asked me to help build two FQPMs—one for the "planet finder" on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, or VLT, in Chile; and one for the Mid-Infrared Instrument that will fly on the James Webb Space Telescope, which is being built to replace the Hubble Space Telescope.

I spent many hours in Liège's Hololab, their holographic laboratory, playing with photoresists and lasers. It really forged my sense of what the technology could do. And along the way, I came up with the idea for the optical vortex.

Then I went to JPL as a NASA postdoc with Eugene Serabyn. I still spent my time in the lab, but now I was testing things in the High Contrast Imaging Testbed, which is the ultimate facility anywhere in the world for testing coronagraphs. It has a vacuum tank, six feet in diameter and eight feet long, and inside the tank is an optical table with a state-of-the-art deformable mirror. I got a few bruises crawling around in the tank setting up the vortex masks and installing and aligning the optics.

The first vortex coronagraph actually used on the night sky was the one we installed on the 200-inch Hale Telescope down at Palomar Observatory. The Hale's adaptive optics enabled us to image the planets around HR 8799, as well as brown dwarfs, circumstellar disks, and binary star systems. That was a fantastic and fun learning experience.

So I developed my physics and manufacturing intuition in Liège, my experimental and observational skills at JPL, and then I went to Paranal where I actually applied my research. I spent about 400 nights observing at the VLT; I installed two new vortex coronagraphs with my Liège collaborators; and I became the instrument scientist for SPHERE, to which I had contributed 10 years before when it was called the planet finder. And I learned how a major observatory operates—the ins and outs of scheduling, and all the vital jobs that are performed by huge teams of engineers. They far outnumber the astronomers, and nothing would function without them.

And now I am super excited to be here. Caltech and JPL have so many divisions and departments and satellites—like Caltech's Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy and JPL's Science Division, both my new professional homes, but also Caltech's Division of Geology and Planetary Sciences, the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, etc. We are well-connected to the University of California. There are so many bridges to build between all these places, and synergies to benefit from. This is really a central place for innovation. I think, for me, that this is definitely the center of the world.

Two Caltech students, Saaket Agrawal and Paul Dieterle, have been awarded Barry M. Goldwater scholarships for the 2015–16 academic year.

The Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program was established by Congress in 1986 to award scholarships to college students who intend to pursue research careers in science, mathematics, and engineering.

Saaket Agrawal is a sophomore from El Dorado Hills, California, majoring in chemistry. Under Greg Fu, the Altair Professor of Chemistry, Agrawal works on nickel-catalyzed cross coupling, a powerful method for making carbon-carbon bonds. Specifically, Agrawal conducts mechanistic studies on these reactions, which involves elucidating the pathway through which they occur. After Caltech, he plans to pursue a PhD research program in organometallic chemistry—the combination of organic (carbon-based) and inorganic chemistry—and ultimately hopes teach at the university level.

"Caltech is one of the best places in the world to study chemistry. The faculty were so willing to take me on, even as an undergrad, and treat me like a capable scientist," Agrawal says. "That respect, and the ability to do meaningful work, has motivated me."

Paul Dieterle is a junior from Madison, Wisconsin, majoring in applied physics. He works with Oskar Painter, the John G. Braun Professor of Applied Physics, studying quantum information science.

"The quantum behavior of atoms has been studied for decades. We are researching the way macroscopic objects behave in a quantum mechanical way in order to manipulate them into specific quantum states," Dieterle says. Painter's group is studying how to use macroscopic mechanical objects to transform quantized electrical signals into quantized optical signals as part of the larger field of quantum computing, a potential next generation development in the field.

"The power of quantum computing would be immense," says Dieterle, who would like to attend graduate school to study quantum information science. "We could simulate incredibly complex things, like particles at the edge of a black hole. Participating in this physics revolution is so exciting."

Agrawal and Dieterle bring the number of Caltech Goldwater Scholars to 22 in the last decade.