Caltech Magazine (2025)

02/07/2025

Caltech has a long history of success in out-of-the-ordinary car races. In the Great Electric Car Race of 1968, Caltech’s battery-powered Volkswagen bus beat MIT’s plug-in Chevy Corvair in a cross-country contest. In 1987, Caltech’s Sunraycer won the World Solar Challenge, the first-ever race featuring solar-powered cars.

Now, the Institute can add another achievement to its list. In January 2025, the Caltech Racer made its debut by competing in the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway:

The racer—an IAC AV-24 IndyCar retrofitted with autonomy hardware and Caltech’s control algorithms that allow for autonomous engine/brake control, steering, and navigation—reached a top speed of 155 miles per hour and an average lap speed of more than 144 miles per hour. The roughly 10-person team comprised faculty members, students, postdocs, and staff from Caltech’s CAST (Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies) who notched the impressive high-speed record even though they only formed the full team and started testing in October 2024.

Discover more: https://magazine.caltech.edu/post/computer-start-your-engine

30/06/2025

“As an assistant athletic trainer in the sports medicine department, I am a medical professional who provides health care services for our student-athletes. Our office works to assist with their orthopedic and other medical needs so that they are able to participate in athletics to their full potential while in school. We're often the first to witness an injury and can serve as a supportive health care partner throughout the entire recovery process.

“Until recently, California was the only state that did not recognize or regulate athletic training as a medical profession. As the governmental affairs chairperson for our state organization, the California Athletic Trainers’ Association, I helped pass a bill that starts to establish regulatory standards that mimic the rest of the nation.

“When you see a physician, for example, they are licensed by the state—this is what athletic trainers want as well. We want the oversight and standards of education put in place. It is a public protection issue, but it can really be a problem in youth athletics and high school sports. There was no guarantee that the athletic trainer on the sideline was qualified to handle injuries or possible emergency situations like concussions and heat illness. This new law starts to fix that.

“I have a great passion for athletic training and what I do, and I love being able to work with my patients through their injuries to see them reach their best potential in athletics and life. The student athletes here at Caltech are amazing, and I am thankful I can be a resource for them. I’m there when the injury happens, and I strive to do what I can to help them return to playing the sport that brings them joy or success in their Caltech career—whatever that means to them.”

—Nick Harvey has served as an athletic trainer for Caltech since 2021. In April, he received the Special Recognition Award from the Far West Athletic Trainers’ Association for his successful efforts to lobby for regulatory standards for athletic trainers in California.

27/06/2025

Meet the : Leo Zhang

“For my first two years at Caltech, I was focused on academics and making sure I was on top of my work. But then I realized there were so many interesting things to do in addition to academics. I started doing trail runs with the Caltech Alpine Club and discovered the beauty of the San Gabriel Mountains. I also got involved with the Caltech Y, initially volunteering in the local community through the Y and then planning events for students to volunteer with me.

Volunteer work for me is very fulfilling, knowing that I can spend a few hours that can have real-world impact. Like working on urban gardens at a local school: I realized that all the weeding we did and all the gathering of plants, like lemongrass, would help provide food for people in need. At the same time, I learned a lot about gardening and how to live a sustainable life. It’s a different avenue of learning than doing equations, but it’s a valuable way of seeing how to translate what you learn into something practical.

Volunteering and exploring research—I did a SURF in 2022—allowed me to take a different approach, to use curiosity to explore how things actually work. Now I’ve expanded my interest to the whole world: Why does the world work like this? Caltech broadened my horizons, and I’m grateful to have met the mentors and friends I made along the way.”

—Leo Zhang, a graduating senior who studied computer science. He has served on the executive committee for the Caltech Y and is a recipient of the 2024 Hastrup Award, which allowed Zhang to take an educational trip to Spain study the Wenzhounese diaspora and contrast their upbringing with his own Miami childhood.

26/06/2025

Meet the : Jimmy Ragan

“I first got involved with the Caltech Y when I saw they were doing a pre-orientation trip to Yosemite. I had done a lot of hiking and backpacking in high school as an Eagle Scout but didn’t have as much of a chance to do it during college. I figured it’d be a great introduction to the Caltech community and a good transition to grad school. I had also never been to Yosemite, so I volunteered to drive figuring I’d be more likely to get on the trip. I just stuck with it from then on. I also tutored a Pasadena student from eighth grade until he graduated high school, which was very rewarding and taught me a lot about how to communicate, especially to those people who can be good at math or science but don’t feel they are right now.

These experiences were a good opportunity to reconnect with the joy of mentorship. Even with the outdoor trips, we would explicitly invite people who had never gone camping before to come. I enjoy teaching people who have never chopped firewood before how to do that and to help them get through the weekend and have a good time. Without these experiences, I think I probably would’ve made it through Caltech, but it certainly would’ve been harder. Caltech’s always going to be an academic institution first, but there definitely is a sense that people care about the community beyond that.”

—Jimmy Ragan will receive his PhD in space engineering during Caltech’s 131st Commencement ceremony on June13, 2025. He currently works as a data scientist at Slingshot Aerospace. Ragan worked as a tutor in the Caltech Y’s Rise Program for five years. In 2019, he joined the Y’s Outdoors Committee, which plans and organizes outdoor adventures for students. During the 2023–24 academic year, he served as a member of the Y’s board of directors.

25/06/2025

Meet the : Alex Viloria Winnett

“As a PRISM leader for three years, I focused on providing a space for people at different phases in their journey of identity development to meet and support one another. There's a lot of joy that comes from q***r community, and our events were designed to foster that.”

“Caltech prides itself on free-thinking, thoughtful inquiry and innovation. That’s what Caltech PRISM is about. We’ve hosted movie nights, poetry and essay readings, crafting sessions, artistic drag performances, hikes, holiday parties, q***r history trivia, and a gender discussion and exploration night—these are opportunities to be creative, to think deeply about the world and about expression. From there, one decides how to live with intention and not simply following prevailing dogma.”

“In the lab, I ask and attempt to answer questions like ‘How does the immune system protect us from infections?’ At PRISM, we ask and attempt to answer questions like ‘Who am I? ‘What does the happiest, most authentic and best version of myself look like?’ and ‘What is love?’ Queerness is so many things, but I see it fundamentally as the freedom to imagine and investigate the answers to these questions. Building q***r community through PRISM at Caltech enables discovery.”

—Alex Viloria Winnett is a student in the Caltech-UCLA Medical Scientist Training Program, which allows students to go to medical school at UCLA and graduate school at Caltech. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Viloria Winnett supported the health care response and then co-led the Caltech COVID-19 Study, which answered key questions about how to use diagnostic testing strategies to stop outbreaks. After Commencement, he will continue clinical rotations for medical school at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.

24/06/2025

Meet the : Aditya Nair

“I think Caltech is a place where boundaries don't exist between different disciplines; you are actively encouraged to go talk to your colleague in computer vision or your colleague who's a molecular biologist. And I think that's because there are so few of any given type of scientist here that we don't have a large community of just people who are molecular biologists or just people who are computer scientists.

My work has been centered around bringing computational and physics-informed perspectives into the study of emotions. My advisor, David Anderson, and members of his lab have been working for many years to understand how the brain creates innate behaviors like mating and aggression. Building upon insights from the group’s previous studies, my research employed machine learning techniques to uncover the hidden neural signals that encode the persistence and escalation of aggression and arousal.

One challenge about publishing research at the intersection of distinct fields is that you’re never enough of a computer scientist for the computer scientists, and you’re never enough of a biologist for the biologists. But by persevering at that intersection and continuing to tackle fundamental questions in neuroscience with innovations in AI, I’ve been able to make an impact that now spans three papers in Nature and three in Cell in collaboration with many incredible scientists at Caltech. "

—Aditya Nair (PhD ’24) is an incoming Nanyang Assistant Professor at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and a principal investigator at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology of the Agency of Science, Technology and Research in Singapore. While at Caltech, he co-founded the Chen Institute Data Science and AI for Neuroscience Summer Schools, which teaches researchers how to develop and apply computational techniques in neuroscience. In his future work, Nair aims to redefine the way we conceive of and treat mental health disorders by drawing on insights from computation and dynamical systems research.

20/06/2025

Meet 2025 Kathryn Edwards!

“It’s hard to process that I’m already getting close to the end of my career at Caltech. It’s been a great experience—from building bonds with my basketball teammates and people in my house to getting into my major classes and doing a SURF where I worked on impact ionization for dust particles in space at the University of Colorado Boulder.

One of the most valuable things to me has been my relationship with my teammates. As captain, my teammates are my best friends, but on the court there are times where I need to be the person who takes charge and makes sure we’re getting the most out of every practice. We challenge each other daily to be our best, ensuring we’re ready for game day.

My goals for my final season are to enjoy my time with my teammates while also pushing for personal records. I try to focus on the team goals first, and the rest follows. It’s more satisfying to have victories as a team rather than just focusing on personal stats.

After graduating, there are two things I’ll miss the most: One is the people. Knowing that my friends won’t be a door away anymore will be a lot harder. And on a different note, I’ll miss the challenge of being at Caltech. Balancing everything from the course load to basketball is difficult. But I really enjoy the challenge. Something I’ve learned is that it’s OK to fail. A lot of students come in not having been pushed to our limits or experiencing failure. But here, we gain the understanding that it’s OK to fail, and we learn the skills to bounce back and continue striving for our best.”

—Kathryn Edwards is a fourth-year undergraduate studying mechanical engineering and aerospace. As captain of the women’s basketball team, she has led the team through a successful season while also achieving numerous accolades throughout her four years. On January 29, Edwards broke Caltech’s all-time scoring record in women’s basketball, earning a career total of 1,420 points to date.

19/06/2025

Meet 2025 Julian Navarro!

“In my first year, I didn’t get any summer jobs I interviewed for. I didn’t know how to talk. I didn’t know what they wanted to hear. Other students had way more coding experience than me coming from high school. When I started teaching at FSRI, I learned how to prepare. I also have a friend at Caltech named Favour Okodogbe who got an internship, and I learned a lot from her about how to communicate in interviews and how to express yourself—like making eye contact and sharing your thought process. That motivated me to help other students who might be in the same position I was in.

Now, with help from Caltech’s CALE (Career Achievement, Leadership, and Exploration) and our alumni network, our club brings companies to campus to do workshops. Last year, we brought NVIDIA and Roblox, and we talked about the interview process and the importance of LinkedIn. Then, we set up photo shoots so people can have a good LinkedIn picture. We also made a visit to Google’s Venice office with students interested in software engineering and quantum computing. These companies want to recruit here, and we give students the opportunity to connect with them directly in a more personal way.”

—Julian Navarro is a fourth-year computer science major from San Juan, Puerto Rico. After working as a teaching assistant in 2023 with the First-Year Success Research Institute (FSRI), Navarro cofounded CS Careers @ Caltech, a club that helps students network with recruiters from tech firms and gain professional development skills. After graduation in June 2025, he plans to start a job as a software engineer at Oracle, where he completed an internship in 2024.

18/06/2025

Meet 2025 Edward Speer!

“When you say you study philosophy, a lot of times people just immediately think of a grizzled old graybeard writing about the meaning of life or whatever, but it’s really more connected to science than people realize.

Every modern field of study is connected to philosophy in some way, and philosophy really acts as a guiding light to new fields of research and discovery. In the time of Aristotle or Plato, all of the things that we talk about as natural science today—they were philosophy then. Philosophy kind of gives birth to these new fields, and in a place like Caltech, it really plays a major role.

I've gotten a chance to look at the philosophy of quantum mechanics, the philosophy of electromagnetism. Those fields are trying to make real progress in what the scientific picture of the world is. In quantum mechanics, we don't have a clear picture of what's going on, of what the theory posits about the world. We have more of a mathematical formula. One side of science is saying, ‘What can we compute about the world? What can we predict?” And philosophy is asking, “Why do we trust our scientific theories, and what do they say about the physical world around us?” And I think that's an incredibly valuable side of the coin to look at.”

—Edward Speer is graduating this June with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and computer science. His philosophy thesis was an ethics paper on algorithmic fairness, which he co-authored with a large language model; he accompanied that with a meta-paper analysis of the success of that collaboration. Speer was a starter on Caltech’s baseball team all four of his years as an undergrad and was recently named one of the Institute’s Sportspersons of the Year. He is also recipient of the Gordon Mcclure Memorial Communications Prize and the Sanpietro Travel Prize.

17/06/2025

Meet 2025 Sulekha Kishore!

“I’ve had so many experiences at Caltech, but they’re all different facets of what I’m interested in.

“I was initially really interested in aerospace, and I did an internship and had a couple of research experiences related to satellites. Working with Professor Soon-Jo Chung [Bren Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems and a Jet Propulsion Laboratory senior research scientist], I helped develop a computer vision algorithm for a satellite called Edge Node Lite that does on-board training, segmentation, and detection of other objects in space. It was especially exciting to see a rocket launch with our satellite and get pictures from it in space!

“Around the same time, I took several classes with Professor Mike Alvarez [Flintridge Foundation Professor of Political and Computational Social Science] and got more engaged in political science research. I helped create a software package that quickly finds and links duplicated information in voter registration databases when someone signs up to vote at the DMV or changes their address and winds up with multiple records. It was exciting to learn about the real-world problems that election officials face and think about how to solve them with theory-informed approaches and tools."

—Sulekha Kishore is a graduating fourth year double majoring in computer science and political science. After graduation, Kishore will pursue her PhD at MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. She plans to research algorithmic fairness and AI alignment, explore the societal impacts of AI, and develop more robust technical foundations for responsible AI.

16/06/2025

The Spring 2025 issue of Caltech magazine, out now, investigates Caltech's key role in the history of and machine learning, as well as how our researchers will use these tools to unlock future discoveries.

03/06/2025

“When I was at the University of Notre Dame, I wanted to find videos that explained how to study excited state photochemistry using the time-correlated single photon counting technique, but it just didn’t really exist. While there are lots of chemistry resources available online to learn chemistry basics, for very high-level techniques—the things that [graduate students] are doing on the cutting edge of the field—explanations of how to do them properly can be very hard to find.

“Eventually, I was able to teach myself the fundamentals of the technique and present it to my research group. My PhD advisor suggested, ‘Why don't you just give that same presentation you gave to the group, hit record, and then just toss it on YouTube and see what happens?’ That was a few years ago but his suggestion was really prescient because it spun off into something that a lot of people wanted to access. The video has now been seen more than 32,000 times, and the feedback has been really positive. I still get people reaching out to me every other month asking me to look at their data or asking detailed questions. It was such a rewarding experience, I eventually recorded two more videos on similar photochemistry techniques and have made hours of educational content.

“I’d like to see more researchers say, ‘Hey, if I've already done the hard work to learn this, I'm going to put at least some of that knowledge online for other people to access as a way to help the broader scientific community.’ The tools for recording presentations and putting stuff online are so easy to do, so it's harder to make an argument to not do it. I hope PhD advisors can encourage their students to develop their pedagogy in grad school, as it can benefit so many folks.”

—Jeffrey DuBose is a postdoctoral scholar fellowship trainee in chemical engineering. His research involves using electrode interfaces to coax microbes into making useful biochemicals.

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