Institute arborists recently treated the ancient Engelmann oak tree adjacent to Millikan pond for a fungal infection that has left it struggling to take in water and nutrients. 

The condition of the tree, which is estimated to be more than 400 years old, has been exacerbated by the recent drought; as a result, the oak is now severely weakened, according to Delmy Emerson, director of buildings and grounds. The treatment to save the tree is considered the last resort.

New Caltech faculty member Andrew Stuart is interested in how the current era of data acquisition interacts with centuries of human intellectual development of mathematical models that describe the world around us. As an applied mathematician in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science (EAS), he generates the mathematical and algorithmic frameworks that allow researchers to interface data with mathematical models. His work is informed by—and has applications for—diverse arenas such as weather prediction, carbon sequestration, personalized medicine, and crowd forecasting. Originally from London, Stuart earned his bachelor's degree at Bristol University and then a combined master's/PhD at Oxford University. He worked as a postdoc at MIT in the late '80s, as a lecturer at the University of Bath in England from 1989 to 1992, and then as professor at Stanford University and the University of Warwick in England. He relocated to Southern California this summer. Recently, Stuart answered a few questions about his research and his new life at Caltech.

What brought you to Caltech?

The high quality research in engineering and applied science as well as the high quality of undergraduate and graduate students. I'm excited by the opportunity to develop my mathematical research in new directions, both in terms of applications and in terms of underpinning mathematical methodologies. There's an undeniable beauty to pure mathematics, but what has always driven my interests in mathematics is the potential for diverse applications, and the role of mathematics in unifying these different fields. Caltech provides enormous potential for collaboration in areas of interest to me, in the EAS and Geology and Planetary Sciences divisions for example, and also at JPL.

For example?

Weather forecasting. Netwon's laws, describing conservation of mass, momentum and energy, in principle have enormous predictive power. But lack of precise knowledge of the initial state of the atmosphere, together with physical effects on scales too small to resolve efficiently on the computer, mean that the "butterfly effect" (in which small changes in complex systems ultimately yield major effects) can lead to poor forecasts. Data provides a potential resolution to this problem, or at least an amelioration of it. Right now we have satellites, aircraft, and weather balloons all collecting vast amounts of data; figuring out how best to use these data can substantially improve the accuracy of our forecasting. A lot of good applied mathematics is about formulating the right problems, as well as finding algorithms for solving them.

How did you get into your field?

I grew up in an academic household; I saw that it was a challenging, stimulating, and intellectually rewarding career. My dad, who worked at Imperial College in fluid mechanics, loved his job and I was very aware of this. I then developed an excitement for mathematics that grew once I started majoring in the field as an undergraduate student.

What are you looking forward to about being in Southern California?

The great combination of urban culture and outdoors life. I enjoy cinema, art, reading novels, and hiking. Recently I have been to Kings Canyon and Sequoia, and I have also visited MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) Grand Avenue.


Anybody can smash a pumpkin, but students at Caltech do it on a grand scale, dropping liquid-nitrogen-frozen pumpkins from the tallest building on campus—Millikan Library—to shatter on the ground below. Over the decades the ritual—begun by undergraduates from Dabney House in 1972—has become a festive annual event, complete with a cordoned-off safety zone for spectators and even a light show.

On Halloween this year, one Dabney student offered her summation of the event: "We just dropped a bunch of frozen pumpkins nine stories off the top of Millikan and they are frozen so they exploded in a billion pieces—and it's awesome. Pumpkin drop is super fun!"

You can see a video about the event here.

Throughout her career as a Wall Street executive, Caltech trustee Deborah McWhinney has helped foster excellence in others by serving as a mentor and an advocate for leadership development. With her $1 million gift to support students at Caltech, McWhinney is once again focused on helping tomorrow's leaders.

Read more on the Caltech campaign website.

Dean Mobbs, a new assistant professor of cognitive neuroscience, studies what happens in our brains when we interact with others and when we are under threat. Mobbs, a native of Kettering, England, received his PhD from University College London and was an assistant professor at Columbia University before arriving at Caltech this fall. Having once worked as a research assistant at Stanford University, Mobbs is no stranger to the West Coast. We sat down with him to discuss the difference between fear and anxiety, the idea of safety in numbers, and his return to California after 12 years.

What is your research focus within neuroscience?

I focus on two areas. The first is using brain imaging to study neural responses to ecologically defined threats. We use fMRI [functional magnetic resonance imaging] and virtual games to put people in various situations—for example, one where they have to escape from a virtual predator, or where a predator is absent, but could appear at any time. These studies show that a potential threat—something that may happen in the near or distant future—evokes neural circuits associated with anxiety. This is in contrast to when a subject is presented with a threat that is present, which evokes different neural circuits that are associated with fear.

We also study the neural basis of social interaction—what happens when you place people into a social environment and how that alters their emotions. Animals live in groups, which is the most common way to protect yourself as an animal. In ecology, this is called risk dilution—or, simply put, "safety in numbers." So we study situations when people are under threat alone versus when they are with two and three other people. We've looked at groups as large as 15 people, and we find that the larger the group, the less fear people feel when they are in threatening situations.

What has your academic path been like?

For many years, I was working as a house painter in the United Kingdom. Coming from a working-class background, my younger brother—a psychiatrist in Oregon—and I are the only ones in my family who have gone to university. Therefore, my path has been defined as overcoming negative expectations and navigating a system that was closed to people of my geography and class.

I returned to school in my mid-twenties, obtaining a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Birmingham. This was followed by a research assistant position at Stanford University, studying neurogenetic disorders. In particular, I was looking at people with Williams Syndrome, which is characterized by an extreme propensity to be social despite other developmental deficits like low IQ. I then did my PhD at University College London where I studied the neural basis of emotion. I followed my PhD with a postdoctoral fellowship at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, and was also a research fellow at Clare Hall in the University of Cambridge.

After my PhD, I continued to refine my research question concerning the neural basis of ecologically defined threats. We looked at the neural effects of distant threats versus close ones—for example, tarantulas—how people "choke" or make mistakes under pressure, how envy increases our enjoyment at others' misfortunes, and the neural basis of vicarious reward or why we find it rewarding to see others win money.

My path through neuroscience was motivated because I fell in love with clever experiments in social psychology and affective science. That was around the time when psychology was becoming more biological because of brain imaging. Since I've been a PI, I have been merging these fields.

What excites you about being at Caltech?

What excites me about Caltech is the intellectual environment. It's a joy to work here. I am also excited by the approaches that the economists take. In my opinion, the best social neuroscience research takes an economic approach, because it uses well-established economic models and game theory, and applies mathematical models to decision-making processes. Coming from a psychology background, I have the opportunity to interact with people who have different ways of thinking about these questions and take a broad approach to decision making—researchers in political science, psychology, neuroscience—and to bounce ideas off of a rich, diverse pool of people.

What do you like to do in your free time?

I have a 17-month-old daughter at home so mostly I am enjoying being a father. I also love taking trips to explore California; it is truly an amazing part of the world, and I don't think I've stopped smiling since I've arrived. 

On Friday, November 11, the Institute celebrated Veterans Day with a special barbecue lunch on Beckman Mall honoring the service and contributions of veterans at Caltech, JPL, and across the nation.

About 200 people attended the event, which began with a color guard presentation. The event featured remarks by President Thomas F. Rosenbaum and a keynote speech by Colonel Nancy Sumner, California Air National Guard, USAF Ret. (pictured).

VIEW THE SLIDESHOW

Three Caltech scientists have been elected as Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for their "scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications," according to an AAAS press release.

Albert Lazzarini is the deputy director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) Laboratory at Caltech. The AAAS recognized Lazzarini for over 20 years of LIGO leadership. LIGO made the first-ever detection of gravitational waves arriving at Earth in September 2015.

Jay Marx is the senior program advisor for LIGO Caltech and former executive director of LIGO (2006–2011). The AAAS noted Marx's leadership of LIGO as well as his involvement with the SLAC PEP-4 detector, which studies electron-positron collisions; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Advanced Light Source, a synchrotron facility that studies beams of X-rays; and Brookhaven National Laboratory's STAR detector, which tracks particles produced by ion collisions.

Michael Elowitz is a professor of biology and bioengineering, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, and executive officer for biological engineering. The AAAS recognized his contributions to the field of synthetic biology, particularly his work on the design of genetic circuits in bacteria and eukaryotes and on the role of stochastic "noise" in living cells.

Six Caltech alumni were also named as Fellows: John Arrington (MS '92, PhD '98), Patrick Dussault (PhD '87), David Eaton (PhD '72), Sidney Leibovich (BS '61), Ardem Patapoutian (PhD '96), and Gary Stormo (BS '72).

The AAAS is the world's largest general scientific society. This year, the AAAS awarded the distinction of Fellow to 391 of its members. New Fellows will be honored during the 2017 AAAS Annual Meeting in February.

Celebrating the 10-year anniversary of the Amgen Scholars Program, the Amgen Foundation has highlighted 10 program alumni—including two with Caltech ties—viewed as "especially poised to impact the future of science and medicine."

From more than 3,000 program alumni who represent 700 colleges and universities across 42 countries, the Amgen Foundation selected Caltech alumnus Todd Gingrich (BS '08) and Michelle Vaisman, who studied at Caltech for three months as part of her Amgen scholarship, as two of its "Ten to Watch."

Gingrich, a Physics of Living Systems Fellow at MIT, conducts research in theoretical chemistry, specifically using mathematical and computational models to understand how molecular motions are affected under dynamic conditions. As an Amgen Scholar in 2007, he worked with Nate Lewis, the George L. Argyros Professor and professor of chemistry, on the screening of metal oxides for the catalysis of water photoelectrolysis.

Vaisman, now a PhD candidate and NASA Space Technology Research Fellow at Yale University, is developing lower-cost, higher-efficiency photovoltaics in an effort to make solar energy competitive with fossil fuels. Vaisman came to Caltech as an Amgen Scholar in 2010 in her junior year at Bryn Mawr College and worked under the mentorship of the late John D. ("Jack") Roberts, Institute Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus, analyzing the structure of a biologically important chemical.

The Amgen Scholars Program gives talented undergraduates a chance to participate in cutting-edge research opportunities at world-class institutions across the United States, Europe, and Japan. The program runs for eight to 10 weeks every summer. As part of Caltech's participation in the program, the Institute provides 20 students a year with research opportunities in biology, chemistry, and biotechnology and related fields. 

Microsoft founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates blogged on November 30 about his recent visit to Caltech and his thoughts on the pioneering research being done here.

Gates visited the campus on October 20 to learn about research being conducted in several labs on campus, to catch up with former Harvard classmate Caltech president Thomas Rosenbaum, and to participate in a question-and-answer session with Caltech students moderated by Professor of English and Dean of Undergraduate Students Kevin Gilmartin.

"We all want to be young again, but I've rarely been as envious of young people as I was during my recent visit to Caltech," Gates wrote in his blog, GatesNotes. "Touring the campus, I was struck by what an amazing time it is to be a student at an institution like Caltech. In every field—from engineering and biology to chemistry and computer science—I learned about phenomenal research underway to improve our health, find new energy sources, and make the world a better place." 

Spearheaded by a $115 million gift from visionary philanthropists Tianqiao Chen and Chrissy Luo, Caltech and the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute are announcing the launch of a campus-wide neuroscience initiative to create a unique environment for interdisciplinary brain research. The goal of the new endeavor is to deepen our understanding of the brain—the most powerful biological and chemical computing machine—and how it works at the most basic level as well as how it fails because of disease or through the aging process.

Central to the initiative is the creation of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech, where research investigations will span a continuum, from deciphering the basic biology of the brain to understanding sensation, perception, cognition, and human behavior, with the goal of making transformational advances that will inform new scientific tools and medical treatments.

The Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute at Caltech will be supported through the Chens' investment, which includes endowed funds to be used at the discretion of Caltech's leadership to support activities such as seeding new lines of research and supporting promising early-career faculty and scholars. In addition, as part of the neuroscience initiative, Caltech will construct a $200 million biosciences complex named in honor of the Chens that will include state-of-the-art facilities for the Chen Institute at Caltech.

Involving faculty from across the university's six academic divisions, the Chen Institute at Caltech will catalyze a campus-wide interdisciplinary community of neuroscientists, biologists, chemists, physicists, engineers, computer scientists, and social scientists, all with the shared goal of understanding the fundamental principles that underlie brain function. The new building will be a nexus for neuroscience research on campus. It will comprise shared lab spaces and centralized areas that foster interaction and collaboration, amplifying and extending Caltech's long traditions in molecular, cellular, and systems neuroscience. As part of the commitment to the partnership, Caltech will also co-invest significant resources to be deployed for the Chen Institute at Caltech's operations.

Chen and Luo, who are husband and wife, are deeply committed to supporting brain research to promote and improve the well-being of humanity. Caltech, with its intimate research environment and quantitative approach to probing the biological and computational complexity of the brain, as well as its robust history in the fields of neuroscience and fundamental biology, is uniquely poised to advance discoveries and to develop new insights that will lead to innovation and improvement in the human condition.

"It is a privilege to launch this vital collaborative effort with Tianqiao Chen and Chrissy Luo," says Caltech president Thomas Rosenbaum, the Sonja and William Davidow Presidential Chair and professor of physics. "We share a vision with our cornerstone partners, the Chens, of translating insights into the fundamental biology, chemistry, and physics of the brain into a deeper understanding of how human beings perceive and interact with the world, and how technological interventions can improve the human experience."

Chen and Luo founded Shanda Interactive Entertainment Limited in 1999, which became the largest online entertainment developer and publisher in China. The company has since transformed into a global private investment company. The couple are longtime philanthropists who have provided funding toward medical programs for children in China and Mongolia, supported education for underprivileged families, and contributed to disaster relief and rebuild efforts in China. Through collaborations with top global universities, the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute's brain research initiative will be focused on three areas: brain discovery, treatment, and development. This gift to Caltech represents the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute's first investment in this initiative and at an institution in the United States.

"Our involvement in the Internet and entertainment industries allowed us to witness the ability for technology advancements to influence human perception, as well as to observe the resultant meaningful effects on human behavior," says Tianqiao Chen, co-founder of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute. "However, there is little understanding about how the brain processes and connects what lies in between—sensation, perception, cognition, and action. We believe uncovering how the brain perceives, interprets, and interacts with the world is pivotal in so many aspects. It can shape groundbreaking industries such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and virtual reality. It also plays a critical role in addressing social issues such as aging and behavioral deficiencies. It can even help answer many ultimate questions about life, such as its origin, purpose, and ending. This is the mission of our philanthropy, and we are dedicating an initial one billion dollars to this cause."

Chrissy Luo, co-founder of Shanda and the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute, adds, "We spent two years learning the subject from highly regarded global universities with whom we continue to have conversations. We chose Caltech as our first partner not just for their strong reputation as a leading research institution, but also for the admiration in their natural alignment with Shanda's culture, which is focused on creating excellence and discovery. We have enjoyed the strong working relationship with Caltech and are firmly confident of this partnership."

Caltech's pioneering work in neuroscience includes Seymour Benzer's discovery that the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster could be used as a simple organism to study how genes influence behavior. It is also illustrated by Roger Sperry's Nobel Prize–winning discovery that the right and left sides of the human brain must communicate with each other for proper cognitive function. Caltech also has been the home of achievements in computational neuroscience such as the development of very-large-scale integrated circuits, their application to machine learning and machine vision, and the establishment in 1986 of the world's first graduate program in Computation and Neural Systems (CNS), which continues to this day.

"Everything that we are as human beings—our ability to see the world and ask questions about our universe—is rooted in the structure and function of our brains," says Steve Mayo (PhD '87), the Bren Professor of Biology and Chemistry and the William K. Bowes Jr. Leadership Chair of the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering. "One of the greatest challenges and opportunities of our time is to be able to unlock that structure and how it relates to function, which will have an enormous impact on the lives of real people."

David J. Anderson, the Seymour Benzer Professor of Biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, will serve as the director of the new neuroscience institute, which will comprise five interdisciplinary research centers—including four new centers, founded through the gift from the Chens, and one existing center. Anderson will be named the inaugural holder of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience Leadership Chair.

The five centers are:

• The T&C Chen Brain-Machine Interface Center
  
  Led by Richard Andersen, Caltech's James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience, the T&C Chen Brain-Machine Interface Center will advance Caltech's work on a new generation of brain-machine interfaces. Caltech investigators have been developing devices that can communicate with and stimulate the brain. Recordings allow intentions to be read out to assist paralyzed people to perform fluid motions using robotic limbs simply by thinking about moving. Stimulation will allow the evocation of new perceptions, helping those who have lost sensation from paralysis or brain diseases. The T&C Chen Brain-Machine Interface Center will support every aspect of this effort, from the investigation of the basic science of intention and perception to technology development and clinical studies.
   
• The T&C Chen Center for Social and Decision Neuroscience
  
  Under the direction of Colin Camerer, Caltech's Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics, the T&C Chen Center for Social and Decision Neuroscience will investigate two important higher-order core functions of the human brain: making decisions and processing and guiding social interactions. Using the center's resources for computational modeling and brain imaging, researchers from different areas of science will collaborate to understand these two core functions. Their findings will help improve how we make personal decisions, allow researchers to design devices and interventions to benefit society, and inform new treatments for neurologically based disorders such as anxiety and autism.
   
• The T&C Chen Center for Systems Neuroscience
  
  The T&C Chen Center for Systems Neuroscience—directed by Doris Tsao, Caltech professor of biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator—will address the challenge of understanding how a large group of neurons firing in concert gives rise to cognition. The Caltech researchers working in this center will explore the neural circuits and computations that underlie perception, thought, emotion, memory, decision making, and behavior. Scientists within the center will collaborate to tackle each of these brain systems, as well as the larger question of how these systems interact so seamlessly. The center will back their new and best ideas with seed funding, computing resources, and labs in which they can develop powerful new scientific tools.
   
• The Center for Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience
  
  The new Center for Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience, led by Viviana Gradinaru, Caltech assistant professor of biology and biological engineering and a Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator, will unite a contingent of Caltech researchers who are making discoveries about the brain's anatomy and development, how neurons communicate, and how processes in the brain can go wrong. In bringing these researchers together, the center will catalyze fundamental new approaches that will help us to understand how the brain works as a whole and to develop new instruments and methods for analyzing the roles that cells and molecules can play in perception, behavior, and disease.
   
• The Caltech Brain Imaging Center
  
  The Caltech Brain Imaging Center (CBIC), originally founded in 2003 through a gift from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and directed by John O'Doherty, Caltech professor of psychology, will make available state-of-the-art instruments and expert staff to provide detailed measurements of the working brain. The CBIC has already made possible more than a decade of discoveries, helping faculty and students gain insight into how people learn and make economic decisions, how they perceive the world and experience conscious thought, and what makes up the neural basis of disorders such as autism, addiction, and congenital brain abnormalities.

"Integrating the biology and the social science of how humans make decisions is one of the most promising frontiers for improving the human condition," says Jean-Laurent Rosenthal (PhD '88), the Rea A. and Lela G. Axline Professor of Business Economics and the Ronald and Maxine Linde Leadership Chair of the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences. "The collaborations that began with the Caltech Brain Imaging Center helped create the new field of neuroeconomics. The Chen Institute at Caltech and its centers will allow us to make new advances to understand why some individuals are so much more successful than others in learning from their social environment."

"Modern neuroscience is one of the most interdisciplinary fields of human intellectual endeavor in the 21st century, and no single researcher or laboratory can master all of the diverse approaches necessary to solve the challenging problems of brain structure, function, and dysfunction," Anderson says. "The Chen Institute at Caltech provides an unprecedented opportunity for Caltech faculty and students in different fields to join forces to take on these challenges, by creating new collaborations at the interface between traditional scientific disciplines. Computational approaches—grounded in Caltech's traditional strength in the physical sciences—will provide a common glue that binds these collaborations together."

Adds Anderson, "Caltech's traditional strengths in basic biology and the physical sciences provide an ideal crucible in which to forge new tools that will crack the most fundamental problems of brain function, such as perception, emotion, cognition, and communication, as well as to develop radical new therapies for currently intractable brain disorders."

Caltech's reputation is built, in part, on 125 years of scientific and engineering breakthroughs in the lab, some of which have led to important products that we use every day. However, helping those discoveries and innovations reach the marketplace in the first place can prove challenging.

To inspire the next generation of Caltech innovators, Caltech held Innovation Week 2016 from November 28 through December 2, inviting a dozen alumni entrepreneurs and investors to share their experiences.

"Caltech has a long history of innovation in science and engineering. However, when it comes to proactively working on taking these ideas to market in the form of new products and services, Caltech got a late start," said Fred Farina (MS '92), Caltech's chief innovation and corporate partnerships officer, on Innovation Week's opening night. "Nonetheless, we caught up very quickly to our peers, and now we have a very dynamic commercialization program here on campus."

Despite its smaller size, Caltech is granted twice as many patents per researcher as MIT, and three times as many as Stanford. Two notable successes include the automated DNA sequencer that enabled the completion of the Human Genome Project, and the CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) image sensor—which was the tiny chip that underpins current digital photography—developed at JPL. In the last 22 years, technology created by Caltech researchers has formed the basis of 238 new companies.

"We want to continue to create an environment here on campus that encourages and fosters innovation and the transfer of ideas from labs to the commercial sector, and this Innovation Week is one of the many steps we're taking to foster this environment," Farina said at the event. "My hope is that during this Innovation Week you, the students who are here, will learn about how to take an early stage idea into the commercial sector, but also see the number of paths that a Caltech degree can take you on—and there are many."

Farina introduced former astronaut Garrett Reisman (MS '92, PhD '97), who delivered the keynote address. After graduation, Reisman joined NASA and logged a total of three months in space on two separate mission. He then shifted gears and transferred to the public sector, where he currently serves as SpaceX's director of crew operations.

Reisman described the culture of SpaceX as one unfettered by conventional thinking and bureaucracy, allowing it to be nimble and creative. A key component of that, Reisman said, is that SpaceX hires young engineers—like the ones in the audience at Innovation Week—who are not afraid to try new ways of solving problems.

"The whole lifeblood of the place is innovation and disruption. If you've been doing it one way for a long period of time, there's got to be a way of doing it better—you just haven't thought of it yet," Reisman said. "The status quo has got to be the enemy. If it's not—if the status quo is a nice comfortable friend—then you're not going to have an innovative culture in your organization."

The week's speakers—which included alumni who now work at Genalyte, aeroMana, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Google, and others, and also featured Caltech Entrepreneur in Residence Dave Licata—addressed questions about founding startups, commercialization and investment, fundraising, and venture capital.

Innovation Week was sponsored by the Caltech Office of Technology Transfer and Corporate Partnerships and The Ronald and Maxine Linde Institute of Economic and Management Sciences.

Garnet Chan, Bren Professor of Chemistry, recently moved to Pasadena from New Jersey, where he was a professor at Princeton University for the past four years. Chan's specialty is quantum chemistry, a field pioneered at Caltech by the late Linus Pauling to understand the behavior of molecules. Raised in Hong Kong, Chan earned his bachelor's degree (1996) and PhD (2000) from the University of Cambridge, then was a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley before taking a faculty position at Cornell University.

Chan sat down with us to discuss his move to Pasadena and his excitement over the Chinese culinary delights the area has to offer—and to answer a question he's heard before: What exactly does a quantum chemist do?

How do you describe the big picture of what you do?

Broadly speaking, I'm a theorist, and I'm interested in going from the very simple equations of quantum mechanics—which are the fundamental equations of nature, the most basic equations we know about the world—to the actual behavior of molecules and materials and real matter that we can touch around us. It's a discipline that involves finding computer algorithms that allow us to simulate these equations, at least approximately.

What makes me a quantum chemist as opposed to another kind of researcher working with quantum mechanics is that the problems I'm interested in are the ones that chemists study. These can be very concrete things like what steps are involved when an enzyme catalyzes a reaction, or what makes a material absorb a specific frequency of light. Basically, we are trying to simulate complex chemistry.

What problems are you specifically working on?

One problem we are working on is the problem of high-temperature superconductivity, which has been a mystery for 30 years. Superconductivity is the name given to the phenomenon where if you lower the temperature sufficiently in a material, you'll reach a point where the resistance to electric current all of a sudden goes to zero. We then say that the material is superconducting. In a certain class of materials called high-temperature superconductors, you do not have to lower the temperature very much. You still have to lower the temperature to minus 140 degrees Celsius. It seems cold, but that's equivalent to 130 to 140 Kelvin, and most materials are only superconducting up to about 10 Kelvin. Even though high-temperature superconductors were discovered 30 years ago, we still don't know how they work.

I have kind of an attachment to this problem because I like problems that people have banged their heads on for decades, and in many cases given up on solving. I think many people would agree that this is probably one of the single most perplexing questions about materials. The real thing that has changed in the last 30 years is the development of new computational tools for quantum mechanics. You used to solve problems by having some inspired guess. Our hope now is that we don't have to make such an inspired guess because we can get at least some of the way there by computation.

I've in some sense worked 15 years trying to build up a set of tools that can address the different challenges involved in simulating these materials. We've recently achieved success in simulating simplified models of the materials. By simplification, one can think of it as like trying to simulate the planets in the solar system, but with some of the planets taken out. We can now can simulate the models to very high precision, and you can see behavior very similar to the real high-temperature superconductors. This gives us confidence that we can soon understand what is happening in the real materials.

Do you have any other projects?

Another one of my interests is related to the biological mechanism by which enzymes "fix" nitrogen. Most of the nitrogen on Earth is in the air as nitrogen gas [N₂], but humans can't process nitrogen gas. Instead, we get much of our nitrogen indirectly from fertilizer—or from bacteria. Certain bacteria have an enzyme that naturally "fixes" nitrogen, which means that it is converted into ammonia or related compounds that fertilize plants. The plants make amino acids, and we eat the plants—or animals eat the plants and we eat the animals. In the end, the nitrogen gets into us.

What makes the biological process so fascinating is that it is able to proceed under ambient biological conditions, while industrial fertilizer production, via the Haber process, proceeds at high temperatures and pressures, and consumes enormous amounts of energy. This means that the biological enzymes are doing some very clever chemistry.  We hope to unravel the details of this process using the principles of quantum mechanics. We've recently uncovered some unexpected behavior of the electrons in these enzymes. Perhaps the answer to how they work lies there!

What happens after you simulate the chemistry for reactions like this?

The results of computational chemistry simulations are used by many chemists, not just theorists like me. In fact, these days a very large number of experimental papers have quantum chemical calculations in them to help interpret the results—in this sense, there is a very healthy interplay between theory and experiment. However, I see the role of our simulations as having impact beyond the specific problems that we choose to study. That is because the tools that we are building to perform our simulations help push the frontier of the types of chemistry and reactions that people can study. Eventually, these tools will be usable by all chemists, and I hope they can be used to study all of chemistry.

Quantum chemistry has always evolved to make new tools to answer more and more complicated questions. In the beginning, in the 1920s and 1930s, people were mainly studying atoms. Later, they studied molecules and what holds them together—Linus Pauling, who was a professor here, started this type of work. These days we are working at a frontier where the tools are being developed to study the most complex problems of biology and materials.

What are you most excited about in coming to Caltech?

I'm completely sold on this place. People here are focused on science, so this is exactly the right place for me. I also like the scale. It's so small that you really feel like you're in some family. Certainly the chemistry department feels like a very tight-knit community.

What do you like about Southern California?

I think there's a reason why so many people live in Southern California. It doesn't get better than this. You have great weather. There's lots of good food. People complain about traffic, but I lived in New Jersey and traffic there is terrible. Also, this area of the country has probably the best Chinese food. There are hundreds of good Chinese restaurants in the cities of San Gabriel, Monterey Park, and Alhambra. Food is such a big part of all cultures, but certainly a big part of Chinese culture, so that's a big plus.

Thanks to a gift from the class of 2016, there are now charging stations at nine strategic locations on campus where users can plug in their phones and laptops.

Emblazoned with a cartoon beaver offering power-ups "Free of Charge" to all members of the Caltech community and visitors, the stations come as either a stand-up version, which includes charging cables fitting most phones and tablets, or a smaller tabletop version that also offers standard electrical outlets for laptops.

The stations are located inside Chandler Café as well as around other high-traffic areas such as the Red Door Café, Winnett Lounge, and Baxter Auditorium. Additional stations are available at the Millikan Library 9th floor study area, the Caltech Center for Diversity, the Sherman Fairchild Library, and the Office of Undergraduate Admissions.

The critically acclaimed television series The Mechanical Universe… And Beyond, created at Caltech and broadcast on PBS from 1985-86, is now available in its entirety on YouTube thanks to the Institute's Information Science and Technology initiative.

The series was based on the Physics 1a and 1b courses developed by David Goodstein, the Frank J. Gilloon Distinguished Teaching and Service Professor, Emeritus, and professor of physics and applied physics, emeritus. It covers topics spanning the scientific revolution begun by Copernicus through quantum theory.

Each episode opens and closes with Goodstein lecturing to his freshman physics class in 201 E. Bridge, providing philosophical, historical, and often humorous insight into the day's topic. The show also contains hundreds of computer animation segments, created by JPL computer graphics engineer James F. Blinn, as the primary tool of instruction. Dynamic location footage and historical re-creations are also used to stress the fact that science is a human endeavor.

Mathieu Desbrun, the John W. and Herberta M. Miles Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, says Caltech was eager to feature the course on its YouTube site because it has been used for decades around the world as a teaching aid, underscoring one of the ways the Institute continues to have an impact disproportionate to its size.

Although the series was designed as a college-level course, "thousands of high school teachers across the US came to depend on it for instructional and inspirational use," Goodstein says. "The level of instruction in the US was, and remains, abysmally low, and these 52 programs filled a great void."

The show retains its impact and relevance, partly because "Newton's three laws are still the law of the land," he says—as are other subjects addressed in the series such as relativity, electromagnetic theory, and quantum mechanics.

Blinn says the series was designed to be rigorous and engaging and used computer animation in a groundbreaking way to visualize mathematical manipulations. Creators of the series referred to the animation as "algebraic ballet," with terms and visual metaphors dancing around the screen to show operations like cancellation and differentiation. "The availability of technology made it so that the developers of the series could see their ideas realized," he says.

The use of Blinn's computer animations—a rare and expensive technology at the time—made it "legendary," Desbrun says. "The Mechanical Universe is a piece of Caltech history and a source of pride."

The series is online at http://bit.ly/2gvNAA3.

Richard Marsh (BS '43), senior research associate in chemistry, emeritus, at Caltech, passed away on January 3, 2017, at the age of 94.

Marsh, who went by the name Dick, was a crystallographer, and a colleague, mentor, and friend to generations of scientists. His career at Caltech started before World War II, spanned the golden age of structural chemistry led by Caltech's Linus Pauling, and continued to flourish into the 21^st century. Crystallography is an experimental approach for determining in detail the locations of the atoms in a molecule by analyzing how X-rays are scattered from a crystalline sample of that compound.

"Dick was a legendary one-of-a-kind crystallographer who was recognized for his mastery of the field and his rigorous standards. He trained generations of students and postdocs and was widely respected as representing the heart and soul of crystallography," says Doug Rees, the Roscoe Gilkey Dickinson Professor of Chemistry and faculty director of the Molecular Observatory for Macromolecular Crystallography at Caltech.

Marsh was born in Jackson, Michigan, in 1922. He arrived at Caltech as a freshman in 1939, graduating with a degree in applied chemistry in 1943. "He would describe the required technical drawing course that he took with an enthusiasm that presaged his future talents in detailing molecular structure," says Rees.

Although Linus Pauling had established Caltech as a world center for crystallography around this time, Marsh's interest in this area did not begin then. In 1945, after Marsh was discharged from the US Navy in New Orleans, the home of his fiancée Helena Laterriere (whom he married in 1947), he started graduate school at Tulane University. He enrolled in the X-ray crystallography course at H. Sophie Newcomb College, the women's college of Tulane, as it was one of the few available classes with an opening. As reported in an issue of Caltech's Engineering & Science magazine, Marsh said the class changed his life, and that the instructor Rose Mooney inspired him to become a crystallographer. Tulane did not offer a PhD in chemistry, so after this introduction to crystallography, Marsh transferred to UCLA where he received his PhD in 1950 with James McCullough for crystallographic studies of organoselenium compounds, which are molecules with carbon-selenium bonds.

Marsh returned to Caltech in 1950 as a postdoctoral research fellow, working with Pauling on crystallography. He became a research associate in 1973, senior research associate in 1981, and senior research associate, emeritus, in 1990. Marsh was critically involved in many noteworthy structural developments, including work on hydrates, trimesic acid, protonated water clusters, intermetallic compounds, and the detailed geometry of amino acids and peptides. Marsh's structural study of a protein in silk called fibroin culminated in the textbook model for a protein structural feature called the anti-parallel beta sheet. That research still resonates today for its implications in the architecture of amyloid fibril plaques associated with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's.

"Dick Marsh was an exceptionally talented crystallographer whose work had enormous impact on young and old investigators alike," says Harry Gray, Arnold O. Beckman Professor of Chemistry at Caltech. "I learned so much discussing structures with him. I knew that if he couldn't solve a structure, it couldn't be solved!"

A characteristic of Marsh's research was to carefully analyze the errors in a crystal structure determination. Rees recalls that Marsh was particularly upset about the most egregious cases of incorrect structure determinations, often due to erroneous assignments of the underlying arrangements of the constituent molecules in crystals. As Marsh noted in his crystallographic history: "I somehow take such errors personally: they should not happen in MY field of study."

From his office in the Beckman Institute at Caltech, Marsh continued surveying and correcting reported structures for the rest of his life. "The threat to other crystallographers of being publicly 'Marshed' for publishing a problematic structure undoubtedly contributed to increased scrutiny and care that prevented a number of incorrect crystal structures from ever being published," says Rees.

He served as president of the American Crystallographic Association in 1993, and was co-editor of Acta Crystallographica from 1964 to 1971. He was the first recipient in 2004 of the American Crystallographic Association's Kenneth N. Trueblood Award, given for exceptional achievement in computational or chemical crystallography.

Marsh was a research mentor to both students and young faculty. John Bercaw, Caltech's Centennial Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus, recalls approaching Marsh back in 1975 to help solve the structure of a key compound that cleanly generates hydrazine from molecular nitrogen. Bercaw had been informed that solving the compound's crystal structure was not possible. After Bercaw explained to Marsh the major importance of obtaining this crystal structure, Marsh immediately accepted the challenge and devised a method for solving the structure, allowing for further studies of the mechanism of hydrazine formation.

"Dick's inquisitiveness, integrity, compassion, and his intolerance of sloppy thinking and bureaucracy, epitomize the best traditions of Caltech, while highlighting the impact that one person can have on a field and generations of scientists," says Bercaw.

Marsh leaves behind his wife Helena; his four children Susan (Bill Winnie), Chip (Kay), Kirby (Bob Lauderback), and Stephen (Susan); 11 grandchildren and their spouses; and four great-grandchildren.

Caltech's Center for Teaching, Learning, and Outreach (CTLO) will host its second annual TeachWeek program from January 17–23. The event celebrates the impact of teaching, featuring events and discussions with Caltech faculty, alumni, TAs, and staff as well as open classes, workshops, and talks with guest presenters.

TeachWeek, whose theme this year is "Empowering Learning," focuses on Caltech's recent efforts to create an innovative learning environment that changes the world through unique teaching techniques. "Year round, Caltech faculty and teaching assistants are investing time and energy in teaching not for its own sake, but to empower students to learn and do more—to go further with their passion, research, and creativity," says CTLO director Cassandra Horii. "That's where our theme, empowering learning, comes from; during TeachWeek, you get a glimpse of the variety of ways Caltech is empowering learning today, as well as new ways we might do so in the coming years."

Caltech faculty, teaching assistants, and others are featured in the opening panel, titled "Empowering Learning through Teaching at Caltech and Beyond," and the closing event, "Ignite Your Teaching: Ideas and Practices You Can Use," with introductory remarks by Caltech president Thomas Rosenbaum.

Guest presenters will include Mary-Ann Winkelmes, a senior fellow of the Association of American Colleges and Universities from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who will give the keynote talk about and lead a workshop in "Teaching with Transparency: Empowering Equitable Learning." In addition, John Pollard, associate professor of practice in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Arizona and co-author of the nationally recognized Chemical Thinking curriculum and book, will present a talk titled "Questioning Why and How We Gather Students Together: Empowering Changes in Curricula and Teaching."

The event is open to the entire Caltech community. Visitor seats in open classes may be limited due to space and activities; you can reserve space online as well as get more information about the week's slate of activities at teachweek.caltech.edu.

Just over 20 years ago, Caltech was a rarity among top research institutions: it had innovative ideas pouring out of its labs, but it lacked a dedicated team to help scientists and engineers transfer their big ideas to the marketplace.

Tech transfer was nothing new at the time—MIT and Stanford had run tech transfer offices for decades. But Caltech's humble culture of hard work that eschewed flashy rewards had a way of stifling the entrepreneurial spirit, says Richmond Wolf, director of what was originally called Caltech's Office of Technology Transfer (OTT) from 2004 to 2006. "We were always the premier science institution. But tech transfer was kind of like an afterthought," he says.

That changed with Larry Gilbert, the founding father of technology transfer at Caltech, who passed away in November of 2016 at the age of 84.

In the 1990s, Gilbert was already a star in the world of tech transfer. He started in the field in the early 70s at MIT, home to one of the first in-house tech transfer offices; created Boston University's office of tech transfer in 1976; and co-founded the Association of University Technology Managers, a national organization now with more than 3,200 members at 300 universities, research institutions, and teaching hospitals.

At the time, patents and licensing at Caltech were handled through the Office of the General Counsel. The need for a dedicated and nuanced approach became apparent to David Goodstein, the Frank J. Gilloon Distinguished Teaching and Service Professor and Professor of Physics and Applied Physics, Emeritus, and Thomas Everhart, president emeritus and professor of electrical engineering and applied physics, emeritus. They recruited Gilbert from Boston University to build an office of technology transfer from scratch.

Under Gilbert, the office became the campus hub for receiving and evaluating invention disclosures, working with the U.S. Patent Office, negotiating licenses with outside companies, and developing commercialization strategies for faculty and students interested in launching startups.

"Larry Gilbert came and took the campus by storm with tech transfer," Wolf says.

The first thing Gilbert did was to start meeting with as many professors as possible, one by one. Rather than give presentations, he sat down for informal chats with the faculty members to learn more about what they were doing. 

Mory Gharib, the Hans W. Liepmann Professor of Aeronautics and Bioinspired Engineering and director of the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories, was among those who sat down with Gilbert and vividly remembers the gruff but knowledgeable man and his ever-present baseball cap.

"He had a deep understanding of technology. I was amazed when he showed up in my office and started talking about my own research and seemed to know even more than I did," Gharib says.

After months of faculty meetings, Gilbert launched a tech transfer office based on four core principles, says current director Fred Farina, chief innovation and corporate partnerships officer: create and maintain trusting relationships with faculty and other researchers; utilize a robust patenting strategy; focus on startups; and always understand that tech transfer gives Caltech two bites at the apple—one through equity from successful companies and the other through supporting tomorrow's philanthropic leaders.

By all measures, the effort was a runaway success. Before OTT was formed in 1995, Caltech annually received an average of 36 invention disclosures—informing the Institute of potentially patent-worthy developments—from Caltech scientists and engineers. Last year, that had jumped to 229, with 196 patents issued, nine start-ups launched, and 1,922 total active patents.

"When I came here in 1995, any entrepreneurial activity that was done at all was done out the back door," Gilbert told a Caltech publication in 2001. With OTT's guidance, Caltech initiated a number of new programs—including the Caltech Innovation Initiative, a fund that helps provide resources to early-stage projects with commercial potential and shepherds new ideas across the "Valley of Death" that separates the lab from the marketplace.

"It's amazing that as a small institute we have such output," Gharib says. "Before Larry, some faculty didn't even know that their ideas could have a use."

Colleagues credit the success of tech transfer at Caltech to Gilbert's policy of developing and maintaining trusting relationships with faculty-inventors and minimizing bureaucratic hurdles to transferring technologies to the marketplace. To secure the future of OTT itself, Gilbert made a point of filling his office's staff with scientists and engineers who have a deep technical knowledge who also have an inclination toward business; he also established a line of succession for the smooth transition of leadership in the office.

Three years ago, Caltech's corporate partnerships office was merged into OTT, creating the Office of Technology Transfer and Corporate Partnerships (OTTCP) and expanding its mission to include management of Caltech's collaborations with established businesses.

Since its founding, the office has helped launch over 240 startups, 25 percent of which have had successful exits (meaning that they were acquired by a larger company or had an IPO), and 40 percent of which remain active, viable companies. Add those to the more than 1,000 technology licenses that have been granted, and the office has helped generate $395 million in gross revenue for Caltech.

In 2015, Gilbert retired to Florida, but remained in touch with his colleagues in the office that he built from the ground up.

"Larry was a mentor and a friend to many people in OTT, including his successors, Rich Wolf and me," Farina says. "He taught us everything we know about tech transfer."

Among the classes a Caltech freshman can take, Physics 11 stands out on the list. For one thing, even to gain entrance to the popular seminar, students must jump through a series of intellectual hoops. Those few who make it through then embark on a unique classroom experience with no set curriculum or exams and without strict adherence to any single scientific discipline—despite the course's name. Thinking outside the box is the norm in this class, and thus it may not be surprising that those who have taken it have gone on to garner prestigious fellowships and spots in the most competitive graduate programs.

"I had been hearing about the course and its 'hurdles' ever since my first visit to Caltech as a senior in high school," says Charles Tschirhart (BS '15), now a graduate student in physics at UC Santa Barbara, "and I was excited to try my hand at the hurdles and see if I could make it into the course."

Those "hurdles" are the two open-ended problems freshmen aspiring to take Phys 11 must tackle during the fall quarter. They are given four weeks to complete each. Of the 30 to 50 students who apply annually, around half a dozen "pass" the hurdles and are accepted into the class, which starts in January of freshman year, continues through fall of sophomore year, and includes funded summer research with a professor.

The late Caltech physics professor Thomas Tombrello, who created the class almost 25 years ago, came up with the basic framework for the hurdles, which take the form of questions that have no right answer and often appear to have little to do with physics. A typical hurdle from Tombrello's era:

In the words of a song from my childhood:

"Mares eat oats, and does eat oaks, and little lambs eat ivy."

Considered in an ecological sense, we have three species each of plant and animal life that interact in a finite geographical area. Supposing that we start out this system with roughly equal numbers of the six species, determine the way the system changes with time.

"The hurdles were designed to test your ability to think creatively and work hard in pursuit of your ideas, without devolving into an achievement test in physics," says Tschirhart. "Most students coming into Caltech know how to deal with the clean-cut, precisely outlined problems you might find in a textbook. The fact that the hurdles are so far outside the mainstream idea of a classic physics or math problem made me feel like I would have a chance if I worked hard enough, and that I would get something out of the course if I got in."

Rob Phillips, the Fred and Nancy Morris Professor of Biophysics and Biology, and Dave Stevenson, the Marvin L. Goldberger Professor of Planetary Science, have taught the class since Tombrello's death in 2014. They set similarly enigmatic hurdles. Recently Phillips asked students to consider the logistical problems of bike sharing in Paris, as well as to figure out the likelihood of running into someone you know at a restaurant or airport. "What's cool about Physics 11—and why I feel passionate about it—is that we're challenging students by giving them things we don't know the answers to and not being so focused on making them into technicians, but teaching them how to ask questions, how to wonder," Phillips says.

The class gathers once a week for two hours, without a set agenda. Sometimes Phillips or Stevenson will email the entire class an interesting article or a particularly knotty problem. "We might talk about the science of the movie Interstellar," says Phillips, "or the physics of breaking waves. Or I might say, 'Hey, I saw this truck carrying avocados bouncing along the highway. I'm curious, by the time it gets to the store are the ones on the bottom likely to be damaged?'"

Sometimes the ideas come from the students. "We met once a week on the top floor of Sloan Annex, in the evenings," remembers Michael Woods (BS '08), now a Bay Area principal systems architect. "We would all bring our dinners from the Houses and sit on a trio of couches in front of a big whiteboard in the lounge. There was no syllabus, no midterm, and no final exam. Instead, there was only an expectation that we would have something to talk about on the whiteboard every week. It didn't matter exactly what it was, so long as it was interesting."

The push for evidence made an impression on Adam Jermyn (BS '15), currently a Marshall Fellow at the University of Cambridge. "You could argue any point in Physics 11, no matter how crazy, but you had better be ready to back it up," he says. "If there were any doubt at all, you would be sent up to the board to prove it. You had the freedom to be creative but knew that you had to think carefully if you wanted your idea to be taken seriously."

Jermyn also remembers how Tombrello would regale the class with tales of science history more personal than any you could find in a textbook. "Everyone was always referred to in the first person, so Professor Tombrello would talk about 'that time Carl was in town'—meaning Carl Sagan. As a freshman, this version of science was really important to hear, because it made it human, and something that I could see myself contributing to."

For all the sitting on couches and breaking bread together, the class has serious goals. As Tschirhart puts it, Phys 11 is meant to "train young scientists how to attack the kinds of difficult, poorly defined, open-ended problems often encountered in research." The class, he says, taught him how to deal with questions that appear intimidatingly complicated or impossible to solve precisely. "The process of breaking down complicated phenomena into constituent parts that you can understand individually is a skill that most people aren't very good at until they've had a lot of practice, and Phys 11 definitely helped me think this way."

The interdisciplinary nature of the course has an impact, too. "It is not and never was physics," notes Stevenson. Many of the students attracted to the course are interested in physics, he notes, but former students are spread wide, working in biology, biophysics, computer science, and on Wall Street.

"It exposed me to a broad range of ideas not as separate fields, but as just different aspects of the world," says Jermyn. "It really encouraged me to look for connections between fields, and to find places where methods in one could help me understand questions in another."

Phys 11 students, Phillips says, "have this playful and curious attitude that's really the basis of science." It also seems to be a basis for accomplishment: Phys 11 graduates have secured Hertz, National Science Foundation, and Marshall fellowships, as well as Goldwater scholarships and entrance to top graduate schools.

Is it fair to call the course a springboard to success? "I don't know how you would decide that," says Stevenson, "since I think these students are destined to excel anyway. But when you talk to them you see that this was a very significant experience for them, an important part of the Caltech experience. For the small subset of students who take this course, it's something very special."

New Caltech faculty member Soon-Jo Chung splits his time between Caltech's campus, where he is a Bren Scholar and an associate professor of aerospace in the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories of the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT), and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where he is a research scientist. His work ranges from the creation of a robotic bat with flexible wings and realistic flight dynamics to the control of swarms of small satellites to the development of computer-vision-based navigation systems. Originally from Seoul, South Korea, Chung earned his bachelor's degree at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), followed by master's and doctoral degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). For most of the past decade, Chung was a faculty member in aerospace engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—visiting California each summer between 2010 and 2014 as a JPL summer faculty research fellow working on distributed small satellites. He returned to Southern California in August. Recently, Chung answered a few questions about his life and work.

What brought you to Caltech?

Caltech's GALCIT has been at the center of aerospace innovation. As an aerospace enthusiast, it was my dream to work at Caltech and JPL. Also, there is a focus on space engineering at Caltech (for example, Sergio Pellegrino's work) that creates a great opportunity for someone like me. Another parochial and nerdy view is that I truly enjoy being in this close-knit intellectual community since my degrees are all from some institute of technology.

Why are you interested in swarm robotics? What can swarms do that individual robots cannot?

When I deliver a research presentation, I tend to show this fascinating video clip of millions of micro robots autonomously transforming themselves into a single structure in Disney's animated movie Big Hero 6. In fact, achieving such a capability using hundreds to millions of autonomous tiny spacecraft has been one of my research focus areas. You can reconfigure your swarm system to another shape quite easily; think about autonomous flying LEGO blocks that can build whatever you imagine. Also, the entire system doesn't fail even if you lose a handful of individual robots from the swarm. In essence, swarms are more flexible, more robust, and possibly more capable than a monolithic system. Applications are limitless, as said in the movie!

Why did you choose to create a bat-like drone? What advantages does it offer?

I started working on robotic flapping flight simply because I realized I could apply work I'd originally done to control multiple spacecraft in Earth orbit to synchronous flapping wing motions of birds and bats. Then, as I read more about animal flight and watched them in action, I got fascinated with the beautiful maneuvers of flying animals with flexible articulated wings. Arguably, the bat is one of the most advanced animal flyers with its capabilities to make sharp turns and perform upside-down perching. The dynamics of bat flight is even more complex and elegant because of the bat's soft membrane wings. I also wanted to challenge the status quo of drones that predominantly use high-speed rotor blades, which are quite noisy and dangerous. The goal is to build a safe, energy-efficient, soft-winged robot that can fly like a bat.

What excites you the most about the future of autonomous vehicles?

I hope Caltech will play an important role in autonomous vehicle research, especially with its Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies (CAST) which is being led by Mory Gharib. I am envisioning that the future of transportation, especially in big cities, will look quite different and I, along with Mory and several faculty in CAST, are looking into developing a research program on autonomous flying cars that could potentially revolutionize our future transportation systems. For example, why should self-driving cars be restricted to a two-dimensional world? It might be technologically easier to achieve a fully autonomous flying car network than to add self-driving cars to the existing roads since there is no gridlock and there are no pedestrians in the sky.

What is the chance that it will rain tomorrow? Weather reports, like many other predictions, give us probabilities of different events—a 50 percent chance of rain or a 90 percent chance of sunshine. Probabilistic statements allow scientists to quantify the degree of uncertainty about events. However, according to Assistant Professor of Economics Luciano Pomatto, probabilistic statements also allow people to hide ignorance and feign knowledge. We sat down with Pomatto, who recently came to Caltech from a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale, to discuss the limits of probability and prediction.

How is it possible to "hide" behind probabilistic language?

I think this is best described with an example. Let's say we want to know the probability that in the next five years the sea level in Florida will rise more than one foot. If I tell you there is a 99.99 percent chance that this will happen, it would be very easy to see, in five years, if I was correct or not. If I tell you the chance is very slim, you are also able to easily find out if I'm correct or not in five years.

Now, let's say that I tell you that I did all the research, and I have determined that the probability is 50 percent. Even though 50 percent is more imprecise than 99.99 percent, if correct, it's still a valuable piece of knowledge—it would help you compute the correct expected return of an investment in the Miami area, for example.

The issue, however, is that it is impossible to test after the fact whether or not a statement such as "the sea rise will happen with 50 percent probability" is factually correct. There is, according to the forecast, an equal probability that such an event will or will not happen—so the prediction cannot be discredited by any single observation. This is a simple but fundamental difficulty. We only get to see if the event occurred or not, not whether it was likely or unlikely.

Thus, one can hide behind this language and pretend to be knowledgeable about the topic.

How does this relate to your current research?

Basic statistical intuition tells us that inference requires repeated observations. If a forecaster can be evaluated on the basis of many consecutive predictions, then it is natural to expect we should be able to tell whether or not such a forecaster is competent. For example, a weatherman who every morning announces a 50 percent probability of rain will soon be discredited unless it actually rains, on average, every other day.

Recently, economists have begun to study this problem more systematically. The main conclusion is that it is surprisingly hard to construct statistical tests that can distinguish between a true expert who knows the actual odds governing the problem from someone who is simply pretending to be knowledgeable. This is true regardless of the number of predictions on which forecasters are tested.

This strand of research started by examining some of the tests that are actually used in practice to evaluate forecasts. What has been shown is that in order to pass some of these tests, you don't really need to know anything about the phenomenon you are asked to predict. What you need to know is the exact test by which you are going to be evaluated, which has been a surprising finding.

In my own research, I develop a statistical test that can, under some assumptions, distinguish between informed and uninformed forecasters. The test is based on a simple intuition: it compares the predictions of the forecaster to the predictions of a fictitious automated forecaster created by the test. This fictitious forecaster represents a benchmark that a predictor must beat in order to qualify as knowledgeable. While the test is relatively straightforward to implement, the difficulty is in constructing the "right" fictitious forecaster. A benchmark that is too strict may discourage even honest forecasters from speaking their mind. A benchmark that is too loose would allow someone who is strategic but uninformed to pass the test.

What got you interested in this particular research?

I am very interested in how people think in situations where there is uncertainty. This particular line of research tackles a basic problem: What are the consequences of accepting probability as a language for making predictions about the future? Can any statement made in probabilistic terms be tested empirically in the same way the laws, say, of classical mechanics can be tested empirically? I find it a fascinating question.

What led you to becoming an economist?

I grew up in Northern Italy, and for most of my teenage years I was mainly interested in the humanities—until I attended a course in microeconomics, a branch of economics studying the behavior of individuals. Economics studies problems that are rooted in everyday reality: How are prices formed? How do people trade? How should we tax income? What fascinated me at the time is how economists strive to identify, starting from these specific questions, a small number of universal principles.

After my bachelor's degree in Italy, I got my PhD from Northwestern University in economics, where I worked on the problem of testing probabilistic predictions as well as other problems related to risk and uncertainty.

What do you like to do in your free time?

I like to watch movies, read, hike, and spend time in museums. I like to do things that give me some time to think.

For example, I recently went to the Getty Museum, and it was a very interesting experience. I'm really interested in understanding how creative people—like designers, architects, or writers—think about their work, what motivates them. I find that creative people are not so different from academics.