Caltech Magazine

03/04/2026

In the 1990s, NASA sought smaller and lighter ways to send camera technology into space to take pictures of the solar system. Researchers at JPL had a spark of inspiration. A team led by Eric Fossum invented the CMOS image sensor, the “camera on a chip” behind the proliferation of digital photos and videos that fill up our world.

by Andrew Moseman The chip that created the camera phone, one of the most widely used technologies in the world, got its start because of an outer space mission. Even though it didn’t get to go. In the 1990s, NASA sought smaller and lighter ways to send camera technology into space to take pictur

30/03/2026

From Techer: The new Palomar Observatory director on commissioning next-generation instruments, hunting for the next Earth, and why there's no place like the mountain.

Astronomer Mansi Kasliwal (MS '07, PhD '11) became Palomar Observatory's tenth director in December 2025. She talks about the upgrades underway, the fifteen-year search for…

27/03/2026

“When I learned that our group was a finalist in the Zipcar competition, I messaged the Plant-Based Caltech group chat to ask for ideas. We had to show off Zipcar in some way in our video. The whole idea of using a car to explore LA’s plant-based food options and connect that community with the Caltech community came up pretty early on. A few generous volunteers—aka my lab mates—agreed to a whole day of filming. Throughout the day, I really enjoyed interacting with the local vendors. I got a lot closer to the people I usually only spoke to when ordering, and it was really a pleasure to hear some of their unique stories of how they got into the plant-based food space.

“For the video itself, I couldn’t have done it at all without Academic Media Technologies. They were the ones to respond to my Marketplace call for video and editing help. They loaned me a GoPro and other video equipment for free. They gave me a bunch of tips on how to film everything properly and what kind of cuts I should do, and they edited the video for us in a couple of days.

“I couldn’t be happier with the video. I hope that it managed to highlight some of the great plant-based options that exist not too far away from us. I hear sometimes that people have this misconception of what plant-based food can be, and they think it’s rather boring or whatever, but hopefully we managed to show some variety and some excitement with the options that exist around us.”

—Elena Priesen Reis, a fourth-year graduate student in materials science, serves as the chair of the Graduate Student Council (GSC) Sustainability Committee, is the graduate student representative on the Caltech Sustainability Advisory Council, and is the coordinator of Plant-Based Caltech. In February 2026, she and the GSC Sustainability Committee won $1,000 in Zipcar driving credit, a $2,000 donation to Plant-Based Caltech, and a $2,000 donation to the Caltech General Scholarship Fund through the Zipcar Students with Drive competition.

is an occasional series celebrating the diverse individuals who give Caltech its spirit of excellence, ambition, and ingenuity. Know someone we should profile? Send nominations to [email protected].

25/03/2026

“I think [Hale] envisioned Mount Wilson, which was going to be the home of technology; Caltech, which was going to be the basic science; and then literature, art, history at Huntington as a [three-part] institution, all brought together,” Rosenbaum said. “So, clearly, we've gone our own ways as separate governing organizations, but I do agree that that vision of the interchange, the connections, the richness, bringing people here. It's all about people.”

By Andrew Moseman Separated by just a mile or so, Caltech and The Huntington have not only deep connections in the present day, but a shared story that dates back to the foundation of each institute more than a century ago. Their intertwined history was the subject of an engaging conversation la

21/03/2026

Alejandro Stefan-Zavala grew up in Maracaibo, where his childhood hobbies included climbing things he was told not to climb and building contraptions from motors and batteries. He spent hours carefully drawing arrow-filled circuit diagrams and blueprints that didn’t quite correspond to what might produce actual working machines but nonetheless fueled a fascination with flight that has grown into a complex pursuit to design smarter flight paths and predict the conditions that make flight possible.

During a Caltech Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow (SURF), he had helped design, develop, and maintain the software that controlled the wall of fans used to simulate Martian winds inside the Space Simulator at NASA-JPL, which prepared the Mars Ingenuity helicopter for its historic takeoff in 2021.

Watch his full talk about Ingenuity: https://magazine.caltech.edu/post/learning-to-fly-ingenuity-mars-helicopter

19/03/2026

“Caltech, right here in LA, is one of the really preeminent hubs of science and technology throughout the world. People do research here and take classes here and teach and learn and read and study and come up with important ideas that define the world,” Joseph Gordon-Levitt says in the video. “If you listed all the things that have been thought of and invented here, it’s really quite impressive. Americans would not have gone to the Moon if it hadn’t been for the work done here and at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which was spun out of this institution here.”

by Andrew Moseman There are all kinds of places in greater Los Angeles that exemplify Angelenos’ love for their hometown. For Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the actor famous for Inception , ( 500) Days of Summer , and Third Rock from the Sun , that place is Caltech.

16/03/2026

Thanh Van Du, a section gardener at Caltech, gives one of our signature turtles a lift.

Says Delmy Emerson, Director of Facilities Operations and Services: "At this time of year, the turtles are coming out of hibernation, and they go wandering all over campus to find a place to lay their eggs; and there are two that love to go into the Caltech Hall fountains. We get a lot of calls about their wandering."

12/03/2026

Astronaut Candidate Lauren Edgar (PhD '13):
"Working in the Grotzinger lab, my background was in sedimentology. I was really interested in surface processes, particularly on Mars, and trying to figure out when and where life arose in the solar system. Could Mars have been habitable? Because of my experience at Caltech, I was able to get involved in some of the Mars rover missions very early on. I worked on the Mars Exploration Rover mission and then most recently the Mars Science Laboratory mission. Those experiences were possible because of the close tie with JPL and Caltech."

Lauren Edgar (PhD '13) discusses her selection into NASA's latest class of astronaut candidates.

12/03/2026

“I study microbes that live in some of the most extreme environments on Earth—volcanoes, permafrost, deep underground.

I had the opportunity to work with an incredible team of cave explorers and scientists inside the crater of Mt. St. Helens this past August. We flew by helicopter into the crater and landed on the glacier housed within. There, we explored ice caves formed by volcanic heat coming up from below—meltwater was pouring down continuously. The crater walls are unstable, and every few minutes you could hear the cracking sounds of rocks and mini landslides tumbling down. The whole place had this quality of being both fragile and threatening at the same time. But what struck me most was the life. This is a place that was essentially wiped clean by the eruption, and yet microbes have made it home. It’s humbling to know that there’s an entire ecosystem quietly rebuilding itself in one of the most hostile places on the continent. That’s when the work really hits you. It’s not just the science, but the sense that we’re still finding out how much life is capable of. Many of the tools we take for granted in biology came from extremophiles first, created by organisms that have been quietly perfecting them for millions of years in places nobody thought to look."

—Tristan Caro is a Foster & Coco Stanback Postdoctoral Scholar and Research Associate in geobiology at Caltech, in the laboratory of Smruthi Karthikeyan, Gordon and Carol Treweek Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering and William H. Hurt Scholar. In 2025, he and a team of collaborators conducted a research expedition to study extremophiles at Mt. St. Helens.

09/03/2026

Located in the Hameetman Center, between the Caltech Store and the Red Door Marketplace, the new Moshaal book exchange hub—named for a Bengali word meaning “torch”—operates like a Little Free Library. Any member of the Caltech community is welcome to take a book and/or leave one for others to enjoy. It opened on March 1.

Learn more with our full story on fourth-year graduate student Muntasir Hassan and his vision for a free book exchange hub: https://magazine.caltech.edu/post/moshaal-open-library-book-exchange-hameetman

06/03/2026

“My interest in autonomous vehicles began with my undergraduate robotics research at the University of Virginia. It also comes from my personal experience during that time. My first semester, I was struck by a car in a hit-and-run. During my recovery, I had this realization that vehicles capable of detecting hazards and responding autonomously could prevent incidents like that.

Fully healed and motivated to pursue that interest, I joined Professor Soon-Jo Chung’s lab and shared my previous experience with autonomous vehicles. He recommended I join his Indy Autonomous Challenge team, which participates in invited competitions against different universities. Our goal is to develop autonomous vehicles and race them. Now, my research focuses on simulation and multivehicle planning, developing strategies to overtake and maneuver around other cars safely and reliably.

When I initially arrived here, the pace of learning felt intense, and I wondered when the theory would translate to practice. When I started my research a year later, the connection was immediate. Every single thing I learned—linear systems, nonlinear dynamics, and mathematical optimization—directly applied to my research.”

—Gilchrist Johnson, a second-year graduate student and a senior research scientist at JPL, works in the lab of Soon-Jo Chung, the Bren Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems.

28/02/2026

Driven by a shared desire to stay connected, Caltech alumni are creating their own meetups that are casual, local, and shaped by their own interests. To help sustain these events, the Caltech Alumni Association (CAA) launched a new initiative to support volunteer hosts.

Established last year, Caltech Together oversees event registration and promotion to help lighten the administrative load for organizers. The program is modeled after Tables for Techers, a casual and community-driven celebration in which alumni open their homes to share a meal with other graduates and current students. CAA works behind the scenes to manage reservations and match guests with alumni hosts.

Volunteer-led alumni gatherings get a boost from a new CAA initiative designed to ease logistics and strengthen community.