Caltech Magazine

26/08/2026

One of the last humans to walk on the moon, and the only geologist to do so, delivers a talk on what moon dust can tell us.

One of the last humans to walk on the moon, and the only geologist to do so, delivers a talk on what moon dust can tell us. By Lori Dajose (BS '15)

24/08/2026

Bill Dally has spent four decades designing the hardware behind modern AI. The instinct came from Caltech: don't do little things.

Nvidia chief scientist Bill Dally (PhD '86) saw the AI boom coming, twice. How his Caltech training shaped the hardware behind modern artificial intelligence.

23/08/2026

"When I was young, I really enjoyed the outdoors—hiking, rock climbing, spending time in Yosemite with my family. One thing I learned really quickly was the importance of ‘leave no trace’—essentially, leaving the place better than you found it. When I was young, I didn't really know what the word sustainability meant, but I was already learning about it through my experience in the outdoors.

“Here at Caltech, the question that I've been fascinated with is whether we could use AI—this extremely powerful technology that is literally everywhere—to tackle the most pressing sustainability challenges. For example, for reducing food waste in grocery stores: If you can better predict how much produce someone's going to buy, you can stock the grocery store accordingly to make sure there's no food waste. AI for reducing global hunger: Trying to estimate crop yields and then provide insight to farmers so they can better optimize their planting and growing of crops to produce more food. Smart EV chargers using AI so that they can intelligently charge the cars when there's solar and wind and clean energy as opposed to when there's more polluting electricity on the grid.

“Managing uncertainty is really a fundamental challenge across sustainability problems. And that has been the core of my research."

—Chris Yeh is a postdoctoral scholar research associate in computing and mathematical sciences whose research sits at the intersection of AI and sustainability. He builds algorithms that help AI systems reason about uncertainty in their own predictions, making them reliable enough to tackle real-world challenges like optimizing clean energy grids, mapping global poverty, and protecting endangered species. In April, as part of the Science Journeys series, he presented the talk, “Smarter AI for a More Sustainable World: Building an AI Model You Can Trust.”

20/08/2026

“I’ve always believed that music is a way to connect with people. It gives us a chance to come together, share ideas, and see things from different perspectives. That’s why I wanted to bring this event to Caltech—it’s about creating a space where science, creativity, and conversation can all happen together.

“Supporting undergraduate students through a scholarship comes from that same place. It’s so heartwarming to watch these students grow and succeed, and to know you’ve been able to give them something that helps them along the way. Hannah Chen (BS ’23), who was the very first student to receive the scholarship, is still very special to me. I visit her in New York whenever I can—I always tell people she’s my daughter.

“Looking back on my years at Caltech, I’ve come to think of STEM as more than simply solving problems. The question is, what’s the beautiful way to solve a problem or build something? You can do it with brute force, or you can do it with creativity. To me, that’s where science and the arts come together, and I hope students see that they don’t have to choose between the two—they make each other stronger.”

—Doris Shimabukuro, a retired Caltech staff member and current Caltech Associates board member, dedicated 30 years to Caltech, serving most recently as associate director of financial systems. Today, she continues to support the Caltech community by endowing an Initiative for Caltech Students scholarship. Shimabukuro and the Caltech Performing and Visual Arts, the Caltech Y Student Activism Speaker Series, and the Caltech Management Association, will present a special August 19, 2026, event in Ramo Auditorium, “From Earth to the Cosmos: A Musical Voyage Through Space and Sound.” The event features imagery from JPL missions and celebrates the intersection of science and the arts.

17/08/2026

The Central Valley of California provides roughly a quarter of the nation’s food products on just 1 percent of its farmland. But, for decades, the state has faced increasing water resource challenges: climate extremes, overextraction of groundwater for crops, contamination of drinking water by agricultural runoff, distribution imbalances, and more.

This dichotomy is the theme of this year’s Visual Culture and the California Environment course (VC 131) created by Brian Jacobson and Hillary Mushkin to explore visual representations of the natural world. In May, students from the class who participated in a field trip got a firsthand look at some of the difficulties farmers face as well as the innovations that could address dwindling groundwater in the Central Valley.

“Scientists can measure groundwater loss remotely using satellites,” says Jacobson, professor of visual culture. “But understanding what those data mean for life and labor in the Central Valley is better understood on the ground among the crops and in the communities of farmworkers.”

The course, which they've just completed for the second time, teaches students about the history of water use in California and its impacts on current conditions through images, archival information, readings, observations, and more. The class explores how artists, scientists, corporations, and others use environmental imagery for diverse purposes—for example, to support a narrative about climate change or to attract workers to areas where labor is needed. Near the end of the course, students traveled for two days through the Central Valley, where large-scale monoculture farming, or growing of a single crop, is taxing the environment, to gain their own unique viewpoint of the areas.

13/08/2026

Pairs of students work at whiteboards covered in grids and numbers, their whispered conversations interrupted occasionally by the crinkle of chip bags and the pop of seltzer cans newly opened. These high schoolers need to be properly fueled on the first day of this math program. After all, their instructors—a Caltech math graduate student and a teaching assistant professor—had themselves needed an hour to solve the problem at hand.

Fifteen rising tenth-grade students from 11 local high schools, including Pasadena High School, Mark Keppel High School, and UCLA Community School, came to campus to spend two weeks in June as part of the inaugural session of the Caltech Summer of Math program.

"We wanted to give students a taste of what we think math really is, which is not how to regurgitate somebody else’s solution to a problem but how to solve problems yourself," says Omer Tamuz, Caltech professor of economics and mathematics and "producer" of the Summer of Math program.

A typical program day started with math lessons in the morning, moved into a lunch break, and ended with an afternoon of solving puzzles and riddles. There were also glimpses into Institute labs: One afternoon, the high school students attended a physics demonstration in the lab of Gil Refael, Taylor W. Lawrence Professor of Theoretical Physics; days later, they visited the lab of Joe Parker, professor of biology and biological engineering, to see the ant colonies used in his research.

10/08/2026

Lithium-ion batteries are embedded in modern life, powering our phones and laptops, EVs, power tools, vacuums, and lawnmowers. Our large-scale energy-storage systems rely on them too, as they support our electrical grid and the data centers that power AI. But a turning point is approaching: Lithium-ion batteries need rare materials like cobalt and nickel, and building batteries to meet exponentially growing energy demand requires more of those metals than the earth can readily supply.

“In order to power the AI boom, we need things like data centers, which require a massive amount of energy. This number is starting to look exponential,” said Kimberly See, professor of chemistry, in her Watson Lecture on the future of battery technology. “The energy needed to power one data center is enough to power 100,000 to 2 million homes. And by the year 2027, we could see 12 percent of US electricity consumed by data centers. That number should make you gasp. This problem is only getting harder.”

To meet this challenge, See and her collaborators at Caltech are working toward batteries made of much more abundant materials.

31/07/2026

Pairs of students work at whiteboards covered in grids and numbers, their whispered conversations interrupted occasionally by the crinkle of chip bags and the pop of seltzer cans newly opened. These high schoolers need to be properly fueled on the first day of this math program. After all, their instructors—a Caltech math graduate student and a teaching assistant professor—had themselves needed an hour to solve the problem at hand.

Fifteen rising tenth-grade students from 11 local high schools, including Pasadena High School, Mark Keppel High School, and UCLA Community School, came to campus to spend two weeks in June as part of the inaugural session of the Caltech Summer of Math program.

"We wanted to give students a taste of what we think math really is, which is not how to regurgitate somebody else’s solution to a problem but how to solve problems yourself," says Omer Tamuz, Caltech professor of economics and mathematics and "producer" of the Summer of Math program.

Caltech's inaugural session of the Summer of Math program encouraged curious minds from LA's high schools to find the joy in solving math problems. By Sharon W. Tran ‍ Pairs of students work at whiteboards covered in grids and numbers, their whispered conversations interrupted occasi

28/07/2026

For more than 100 years, Caltech’s Earnest C. Watson Lecture Series has brought the wonder and excitement of groundbreaking research to the public through free live events designed to spark conversation and connection. Here's what we learned this past year.

by Sabrina Pirzada For more than 100 years, Caltech’s Earnest C. Watson Lecture Series has brought the wonder and excitement of groundbreaking research to the public through free live events designed to spark conversation and connection. The 2025–26 season drew thousands of guests to Beckman Au

23/07/2026

The story of two Caltech scientists, separated in time by 70 years.

In 2025, as the Eaton Fire swept through his Altadena neighborhood, Caltech geochemist François Tissot redirected the tools of planetary science toward a more earthbound problem: How much toxic lead was released into our environment as homes that were built before lead bans burned? In so doing, he echoed the work of a different era of Caltech science.

In the 1950s, Caltech geochemist Clair C. Patterson set out to determine the age of the Earth using isotopic variations of lead as his main tool. Answering questions about the distant past requires evidence that records the passage of time. In geochemistry, that evidence comes in the form of changes in isotope ratios—the relative abundances of subtle variants of a chemical element—which can be measured with extraordinary precision to reveal a sample's age and origin.

Read their full story: https://magazine.caltech.edu/post/the-element-that-knew-too-much