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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Andersen, James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience, has been selected as a recipient of one of the first grants from the California Blueprint for Research to Advance Innovations in Neuroscience (Cal-BRAIN) program.

Cal-BRAIN, a joint initiative led by UC San Diego and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is the California complement to President Obama's federal BRAIN Initiative. Scientists from all California nonprofit research institutions were eligible to apply for the state initiative's first round of $120,000 seed grants; Andersen from Caltech and the 15 other inaugural winners from Stanford, USC, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and 10 UC campuses were selected from a pool of 126 applicants.

The initiative's goal is for funded projects to use an interdisciplinary approach to advance the diagnosis and treatment of all brain disorders as well as develop better neural prosthetic devices that would allow paralyzed patients to move a robotic limb using signals from the patient's own brain. By supporting this research specifically, Cal-BRAIN aims to position California as a leader in the growing neurotechnology sector—a possible future source of economic growth and job creation in the state.

Andersen's Cal-BRAIN–funded project, titled "Engineering Artificial Sensation," will focus on artificially replicating the sensation of touch in patients with paralysis accompanied by loss of touch perception; such replication would improve the dexterity of neural prosthetic devices. This capability, when combined with a traditional neural prosthetic device and robotic arm, would enable patients to manipulate their environment and would provide feedback allowing them to recognize, for example, that they had used too much or too little force when grasping an object. The project is being done in collaboration with physicians Charles Liu, Brian Lee, and Christi Heck at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and the USC Neurorestoration Center. 

A full list of the Cal-BRAIN funded institutions, researchers, and projects can be viewed here: http://cal-brain.org/content/cal-brain-awards-2015.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: What do you do?

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

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

Q: How can we narrow the working angle?

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

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

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

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

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

Q: Such as?

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

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

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

Q: How can you figure out the history?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today we celebrate Ditch Day, one of Caltech's oldest traditions. During this annual spring rite—the timing of which is kept secret until the last minute—seniors ditch their classes and vanish from campus. Before they go, however, they leave behind complex, carefully planned out puzzles and challenges—known as "stacks"—designed to occupy the underclassmen and prevent them from wreaking havoc on the seniors' unoccupied rooms.

Follow the action on Caltech's Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages as the undergraduates tackle the puzzles left for them to solve around campus. Join the conversation by sharing your favorite Ditch Day memories and using #CaltechDitchDay in your tweets and postings.

A $15 million pledge to Caltech from trustee James F. Rothenberg and his wife, Anne, will fuel two areas of intrinsic importance to the Institute: graduate student support and research innovation.

The Rothenbergs' gift will endow fellowships across the Institute's six academic divisions. In addition, the Rothenbergs have bolstered their already generous support for the Caltech Innovation Initiative (CI²).

"The Rothenbergs' generosity underscores Caltech's commitment to supporting outstanding scholars in an environment of ambition and innovation," says President Thomas F. Rosenbaum, holder of the Sonja and William Davidow Presidential Chair and professor of physics. "It helps the Institute to both create knowledge for the long term and offer solutions to the problems that confront society now. We are enormously grateful for Jim and Anne's choice to give so strategically and enthusiastically."

James Rothenberg sees the couple's gift to Caltech as an effective way to invest in the country's future.

"I think that over time there are two drivers of the U.S. economy other than natural resources: education—an educated labor force, an educated populace—and innovation," he says. "As a country, we seem to do better at that than most places in the world. From my perspective, anything I can do to help spur that kind of activity at Caltech makes perfect sense."

Across the higher education landscape, there is strong competition to recruit the top graduate students who accelerate progress in the laboratories of the faculty who train and mentor them. In this environment, Rothenberg sees a compelling argument to endow more and larger fellowships at Caltech. "I want Caltech to be able to attract excellence, wherever excellence may be," he says, "because excellent people will get things done."

Accomplished graduate fellows are one element of an overall institutional culture that has Rothenberg impressed by Caltech, a "major institution" right in the Pasadena resident's backyard. In particular, he cites the Institute's output in comparison with that of other universities. "The more you learn about Caltech, the more you see how much gets accomplished with a relatively small faculty and budget," he says.

CI² is a case in point. Launched in 2009, CI² provides essential seed funding for early-stage research that addresses pressing problems and could lead to marketable technologies. These internal grants spur creativity by giving Caltech faculty more freedom to develop bold ideas, bridging the gap between initial work and the proof of concept often required for government support or venture capital investments.

Already, the Institute has applied for more than 100 patents related to dozens of investigations backed by CI². Even so, while he is pleased with the "interesting things" that have come out of CI² thus far, Rothenberg is focused on what might be possible with continued investment over the long term. "It's still early to know whether you'll get payoff," he says. "If you hit one out of ten, it's good."

Rothenberg was elected to the Caltech Board of Trustees in 2006. He chairs the board's Business and Finance Committee, serves as vice chair of the Development Committee, and is a member of the Investment Committee. He also participates in the life of the Institute as a member of the Caltech Associates.

"The impact of Jim and Anne's gift goes beyond the crucial support it supplies and the breakthroughs it may enable," says David L. Lee (PhD '74), chair of the Caltech Board of Trustees. "When the people who know the Institute best make substantial commitments, it sends an unmistakable message: Caltech is the place to be, philanthropically."

A two-time Harvard alumnus (he received a BA and an MBA from Harvard University), James Rothenberg also plays a prominent role at his alma mater—where he has served as treasurer and currently chairs the board for the subsidiary that manages its endowment, the Harvard Management Company.

Of his connections to Harvard and Caltech—both elite hubs of higher education—he notes, "I think they're valuable institutions, both of them, and very different."

Rothenberg, a chartered financial analyst, is chairman of the Los Angeles-based Capital Group Companies, Inc., a premier investment management firm where he has held a variety of leadership positions since joining in 1970. He serves on several corporate boards, including those of Capital Research and Management Company and American Funds Distributors, Inc., and is a portfolio counselor and vice chairman for the Growth Fund of America. He also sits on the boards of Huntington Memorial Hospital, KCET, and the J. Paul Getty Trust.

Anne Rothenberg has worked as a reporter or editor for Life, Fortune, and Architectural Digest magazines. She is a member of the Board of Trustees for The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

For all of the leadership and support that James Rothenberg supplies to Caltech, he maintains a certain sense of wonder about the Institute's prominent role in frontier-defining investigations.

"It gives you a different feeling when the rover lands on Mars," he says. "Listening to someone who's going to spend the next six, eight years working on the next mission—it's fascinating to think about. I want to be part of keeping Caltech a vibrant and vital place."

Caltech seniors Jonathan Liu, Charles Tschirhart, and Caroline Werlang will be engaging in research abroad as Fulbright Scholars this fall. Sponsored by the Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the Fulbright Program was established in 1946 to honor the late Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas for his contributions to fostering international understanding.

Jonathan Liu is an applied physics major from Pleasanton, California, who will be doing research at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich in Germany. He plans to work with a biophysicist studying how DNA moves in a liquid with a thermal gradient, which could shed light on the molecular origins of life. Long strands of DNA should break apart well before they have time to organize themselves into the complicated arrangements needed to be self-reproducing, but previous work in the lab Liu is joining has hinted that deep-sea hydrothermal vents may have allowed long strands to form stable clusters. Liu plans to enroll at UC Berkeley for graduate study in physics at the PhD level on his return; he was awarded one of UC Berkley's Graduate Student Instructorships to support his work.

Charles Tschirhart of Naperville, Illinois, is a double major in applied physics and chemistry. He will be studying condensed matter physics at the University of Nottingham, England, where he plans to develop new ways to "photograph" nanometer-sized (billionth-of-a-meter-sized) objects using atomic force microscopy. He will then proceed to UC Santa Barbara to earn a PhD in experimental condensed matter physics. Charles has won both a Hertz fellowship and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship; both will support his PhD work at UC Santa Barbara.

Caroline Werlang, a chemical engineering student from Houston, Texas, will go to the Institute of Bioengineering at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland to work on kinases, which are proteins that act as molecular "on/off" switches. She will join a lab that is trying to determine how kinases select and bind to their targets in order to initiate or block other biological processes—an important step toward designing a synthetic kinase that could activate a tumor-suppressor protein, for example. After her Fulbright, she will pursue a doctorate in biological engineering at MIT. Caroline's PhD studies will be supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.

The Fulbright Program is the flagship international exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government. Seniors and graduate students who compete in the U.S. Fulbright Student Program can apply to one of the more than 160 countries whose universities are willing to host Fulbright Scholars. For the academic program, which sponsors one academic year of study or research abroad after the bachelor's degree, each applicant must submit a plan of research or study, a personal essay, three academic references, and a transcript that demonstrates a record of outstanding academic work.

It is no secret that Caltech's graduate students have unparalleled research opportunities. Working closely with faculty advisers and colleagues in diverse fields across campus, their contributions are essential to the Institute's advances in science, engineering, and technology. For nearly two decades, the Everhart Lecture Series has provided a venue to highlight graduate student research at Caltech.

The annual series, named after Caltech president emeritus Tom Everhart, provides three carefully selected graduate students with an opportunity to present their work to an Institute-wide audience. The series was established with the goal of "encouraging interdisciplinary interaction and helping faculty and graduate students across campus to share ideas about recent research developments, problems and controversies, and to recognize the exemplary presentation and research abilities of Caltech's graduate students."

"Having the ability to demonstrate your work to the broader community—those outside of your own scientific area—is extremely important, and too often graduate students have very little experience with this," says graduate student Constantine Sideris, the 2014–15 chair of the Everhart Lecture Series committee, an interdisciplinary committee of graduate students that selects the three graduate student lecturers from a pool of more than a dozen applicants each fall.

"This series allows them to hone their presentation and dynamic speaking skills, and also their ability to explain difficult, technical concepts to a diverse audience," Sideris says.

This year's lecturers—Carissa Eisler (chemistry and chemical engineering), Roarke Horstmeyer (electrical engineering), and Peter Rapp (chemistry and chemical engineering)—gave talks on campus earlier this spring, and all three were invited to share their work with members of the Caltech community during the Institute's annual Seminar Day event in May. This year's lectures span a range of topics, from enhancing solar-cell efficiency, to improving microscope imaging, to understanding polymers. (Complete lecture descriptions from the students as well as links to podcasts of the recorded talks on iTunes U can be found below.)

"Research is only getting more interdisciplinary, so effectively communicating your work is an essential skill," says Eisler. "The lecture was really challenging, and I was very nervous, but it was incredibly rewarding, and I'm so glad that I did it."

Eisler and her colleagues noted that participating in the lectures provided valuable learning opportunities—by forcing them to synthesize and explain their work to individuals outside of their respective fields—and helped to build campus awareness for the breadth of research that's being done by graduate students.

"I work with a team of remarkable people, and I hope the lecture communicated that my project is just one among many exciting projects in our lab," Rapp says.  

Lecture Descriptions:

Building a Brighter Future: Spectrum-Splitting as a Pathway for 50% Efficiency Solar Cells
By Carissa Eisler
Lab: Harry Atwater, Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science and director of the Resnick Sustainability Institute

Although possible, ultra-high solar-cell efficiencies (>50 percent) have not been achieved because of limitations by current fabrication methods. Spectrum-splitting modules, or architectures that employ optical elements to divide the incident spectrum into different color bands, are promising because they can convert each photon more efficiently than traditional methods. This talk discusses our design and prototyping efforts to create such a spectrum-splitting module. We explore the spectrum-splitting optics and geometric optimizations in the context of high-efficiency designs. We show a design that achieves 50 percent efficiency with realistic device losses and geometric constraints. 

Listen to the lecture on iTunesU: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/building-brighter-future-spectrum/id986954281?i=341029550&mt=2

Computational Microscopy: Turning Megapixels into Gigapixels
By Roarke Horstmeyer
Lab: Changhuei Yang, Professor of Electrical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Medical Engineering

Optical aberrations limit the size of current microscope images to tens of megapixels. This talk will present a method to boost a microscope's resolving power to one gigapixel using a technique termed Fourier ptychography. No moving parts or precision controls are needed for this resolution enhancement. The only required hardware is a standard microscope, which we outfit with a digital detector and an array of LEDs. An optimization algorithm does the rest of the work. Example applications of our new microscope include full-slide digital pathology imaging, wide-scale surface profile mapping of human blood, and achieving sub-wavelength resolution without needing oil immersion.

Listen to the lecture on iTunesU: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/computational-microscopy-turning/id986954281?i=341030229&mt=2

Shaking Hands in a Crowded Room: How Sticky Polymers Travel through Viscoelastic Gels
By Peter Rapp
Lab: David Tirrell, Ross McCollum-William H. Corcoran Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering; Director, Beckman Institute

What if you could give a polymer hands and feet and watch it move? We have developed biological approaches to synthesizing functional materials made from proteins, nature's flagship polymers. These approaches provide a set of tools for answering fundamental questions in polymer physics and for synthesizing dynamic materials that find applications in soft-tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. This talk will explore the dynamics of a model "sticky" polymer: an artificial protein engineered with associative endblocks that self-assembles into viscoelastic hydrogels. Fluorescence relaxation studies have demonstrated that polymer diffusion in these gels is controlled by endblock exchange, a process akin to a molecular handshake. Genetic approaches to modifying the endblock architecture enable tuning of polymer mobility over a wide range.

Listen to the lecture on iTunesU: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/shaking-hands-in-crowded-room/id986954281?i=343195468&mt=2

On June 4, the 60th Annual Caltech Staff Service Awards will celebrate 247 staff members for their "on-the-job excellence and commitment to Caltech." The awards are presented in recognition of length of service, starting at the 10-year mark. The employees recognized this year have reached milestones of service ranging from 10 to 45 years. They have collectively served Caltech and its community for a total of 4,490 years.

"The Staff Service Awards is a special time when Caltech staff members are recognized and thanked for their passion for and dedication to the Institute," says Julia McCallin, associate vice president for human resources. "We honor them and their families in this annual ceremony for helping make Caltech the world's premier research and educational institution."

Hear what it's like to work at Caltech from some of this year's honored employees.

In addition, one staff member will receive the annual Thomas W. Schmitt Annual Staff Prize, presented to an individual "whose contributions embody the values and spirit that enables the Institute to achieve excellence in research and education." The prize is selected from community nominations by a committee of faculty and staff members.

The awards will be given at a ceremony in Beckman Auditorium beginning at 10 a.m., with a reception in Dabney Lounge and Garden to follow.

The 60th Annual Staff Service Awards will be presented in Beckman Auditorium on Thursday, June 4, at 10 a.m. During the ceremony, nearly 250 staff members whose service ranges from 10 to 45 years will be honored for their commitment to Caltech. A full list of awardees is online.

Among the honorees is Robert A. Taylor, who has worked at the Institute for the last 45 years, most recently in the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA) for the Laser Interferometry Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project. We spoke with Taylor about his four-and-a-half decades at Caltech.

Can you tell us how you originally came to Caltech and a little about your career?

In 1969, I was attending Pasadena City College, majoring in electronics analysis. I came to class one evening and my instructor, who was the chief engineer for the Seismology Laboratory at Caltech, asked if I would like to work for Caltech. I said yes. The job was in the Division of Geology and Planetary Sciences with Dr. Anderson [Don L. Anderson, the late Eleanor and John R. McMillan Professor of Geophysics, Emeritus, and former director of the Seismology Lab] to help build the seismometer that was to go to the moon.

In GPS, I enjoyed working with the students on their thesis projects and on other projects that have come along over the years. Some of those projects have taken me to places that most people never get to go. I observed an atomic bomb detonation in Nevada, serviced a seismic station at the base of the Andes Mountains in Peru, and dove on coral reefs off Sumatra, Indonesia. In the deserts of California, Arizona, and New Mexico, I did experiments with the first rocks brought back from the moon. That is just the first half of my time here at Caltech.

The second half is still ongoing. In 2001, I transferred to PMA, to continue my journey with LIGO, running the ultrahigh-vacuum bake lab. The purpose is to clean the parts that go into the vacuum envelope of the interferometer. LIGO is by far the most interesting project I have worked on since I have been here at Caltech.

What were your first impressions of Caltech?

Quite frankly, I was a bit intimidated at first. I had never worked in an academic atmosphere before with the kind of prestigious people that I come in contact with on a daily basis. For example, the first office that I had was across the hall from Dr. Charles F. Richter [developer of the Gutenberg-Richter law for measuring the size of an earthquake]. Could that be more awesome? But I soon realized that the people around me were accepting me as part of the team at Caltech.

What has been the most exciting moment for you so far at Caltech?

There are two moments that stick in my mind. The first is the research that we did in Indonesia with Dr. Sieh [Kerry Sieh, formerly Caltech's Robert P. Sharp Professor of Geology], taking coral samples from reefs in the Batu Islands off Sumatra. The other was the first time I visited the LIGO Livingston Observatory and saw firsthand a full-size interferometer.

What has changed the most for you here over the last 45 years?

I think what has changed most is my idea of what is possible. At Caltech, the possibilities are limitless.

How much longer do you think you will stay?

Let's just put it this way: I love what I do. I feel like the luckiest person alive to have been invited to participate and be a part of Caltech.

Ruben Carmona, a grill station cook in Caltech's Chandler Cafeteria, is the winner of the 2015 Schmitt Prize. The prize is awarded annually to Caltech staff members who embody the values and spirit of the Institute through their work, directly or indirectly supporting its research and teaching mission through the professionalism and commitment they bring to their jobs.

Carmona has been a Caltech employee since 2001, working in culinary services both on campus and at JPL. He began his career at Chandler Cafeteria, moving to JPL's Café 167 in 2002, where he worked for four years before returning to campus in 2006.

"I have been here almost 15 years, and I love it," Carmona said. "Working at Caltech, I feel like I am part of a family. When I see that smile from my customers—students, faculty, staff—it's a reward for me."

Carmona was nominated by an anonymous member of the Caltech community who testified to his dedication to his work as well as his grace under pressure, writing, "I challenge anyone to name another person on campus who, day in and day out, approaches his or her job with more enthusiasm, pride, and attention to detail than Ruben. No matter how colossal the crowd of hungry students, faculty members, and staff clustered around his station is, Ruben prepares each and every delicious meal with unmatched speed and professional skill."

The nominator also cited Carmona's unwavering good humor, attesting that "he is never anything but calm and courteous, no matter how chaotic it gets (and we all know how hectic the noon hour in Chandler can be). Even on the craziest days, Ruben will cheerfully go out of his way to accommodate a special request."

The prize was presented to Carmona on June 4 during the 60th annual Staff Service Awards, which honored staff members who have worked at Caltech for periods ranging from 10 to 45 years.

Carmona recalls his reaction to hearing his name called as the winner. "It was shocking," he says. "I'm still surprised; I can't believe it. I got a letter last week, and I knew I was nominated, and just knowing that was exciting for me. …This is incredible. Thank you. Thank you, everybody."

Senior director of dining services Jonathan Webster, who is Carmona's supervisor, noted that the dining services team was very excited about Carmona's honor.

"We are very grateful to have an employee as dedicated as Ruben on our staff," says Webster. "He has been a fixture at the Chandler grill station for over 15 years. One thing to note about the grill station is the constant heat: constant orders coming in, hot equipment all around, and hungry people waiting for their food. Ruben still has time to greet everyone cordially, chat with his regulars, and know his customers''regular' orders."

The Schmitt Prize was established in 2007 through the initiative of Thomas W. Schmitt, former associate vice president for human resources. Schmitt proposed the idea of a staff prize to senior administrators, and it was eventually funded by Ted Jenkins, Caltech alumnus (BS '65, MS '66) and trustee, who spent his professional career in the semiconductor industry. All staff members are eligible for this award and are nominated by members of the Caltech community.

Each year as Commencement day approaches, Caltech's senior class traditionally makes a single combined gift to the Institute. But the class of 2015 has given that plan an unusual twist. In lieu of one joint contribution, each senior has been asked to "give back to the area of campus that has meant the most to you—whether it's your house, scholarships, athletics, student life," or any other facet of the undergraduate experience.

The idea is being championed by senior class copresidents Aditya Bhattaru and David Flicker, along with the senior representatives of all eight student houses. And to sweeten the deal, faculty alumni Tom Soifer (BS '68) and Kip Thorne (BS '62) have agreed to match each donation, dollar for dollar, up to a maximum of $20.15 per senior (commemorating the year) and $4,000 overall.

Individually earmarking multiple contributions makes for a less traditional legacy than something monolithic, like a bench or a scholarship or an avocado grove, but it is no less welcome. "Senior class gifts aren't about things," says Perry Radford, Caltech's assistant director of annual giving programs—young alumni and student philanthropy. "They're about culture, about awareness, about getting people engaged."

Evidently, the seniors think so too: by the end of May the campaign had raised more than $3,000, with nearly a third of the class participating. Radford says she is gratified by the wide variety of targets the students have designated. "They're giving to Student Life programs, to music, to athletics and SURF and the endowments of their undergraduate houses."

But the recipient most often named is the Art Chateau. A converted house in the northeast corner of campus, it hosts facilities for painting, drawing, ceramics, and other visual arts—none of which require a mouse or a keyboard. Its silk-screening equipment, used by student clubs throughout the year to make T-shirts, is in high demand in the weeks leading up to Ditch Day.

The Caltech Parents page on Facebook recently highlighted one of the fund-raiser's more entertaining events. Dean of Undergraduate Students John Dabiri (MS '03, PhD '05), Master of Student Houses Erik Snowberg, and men's basketball head coach Oliver "Doc" Eslinger spent an April day performing charity calisthenics: $2 a push-up. With 26 students donating a total of nearly $800, the three obliged with 377 push-ups. When Dabiri and Snowberg pledged to match, out of their own pockets, the donation of any student who joined in the workout, 15 of the 26 students accepted their challenge, pumping out an extra 256 push-ups and earning an additional $533.55 in matching funds.

Such activities, says Radford, send a powerful message. "Students' relationships with the Caltech Fund begin at the start of freshman year, and the entire time these seniors have been on campus, philanthropy has been happening all around them. But now that they're actually making their own donations—the first time for many of them—they're seeing how generosity breeds generosity."

She credits last year's seniors with inspiring this year's class. "The Caltech penny press of 2014 demonstrated how exciting a senior gift campaign can be. But more importantly, the class of 2014 taught the class of 2015 that philanthropy can be fun."

Living with type 1 diabetes today is typically manageable thanks to advancements in medical technology. However, some patients still confront severe complications, from extreme hypoglycemia that can lead to diabetic coma to long-term effects, such as blindness, nerve damage, and kidney failure. In some cases, type 1 diabetes can be life-threatening, and in all cases, it is currently incurable.

But there is hope, fostered by a collaboration between Caltech and its neighbor in Duarte, City of Hope. Established in 2008 with a $6 million gift from an anonymous donor, the Caltech-City of Hope Biomedical Research Initiative provides seed grants to accelerate the development of basic scientific research and its translation into applications ranging from new pharmaceuticals to medical devices to treatment methods. The partnership was formalized—and further strengthened—in 2014, when the two institutions signed a memorandum of understanding, encouraging researchers to collaborate and share resources.

Leadership from Caltech and City of Hope and members of the public celebrated the partnership at a special event on May 13. More than 70 attendees gathered in Caltech's Beckman Institute Auditorium to learn about progress in fighting diabetes.

"The benefits of the deepening relationship between our two institutions emerged clearly in the evening's events," says Caltech President Thomas F. Rosenbaum, holder of the Sonja and William Davidow Presidential Chair and professor of physics. "Our increasing set of research interactions is making great strides in translating fundamental science to advance human health."

To date, the initiative has funded 28 endeavors led by teams of Caltech and City of Hope investigators—early-stage research projects that might not have moved forward if they had had to rely on traditional funding sources.

"The more we work together, the more we enable discovery," says City of Hope president and CEO Robert Stone. "Saving lives today and tomorrow—that's what this collaboration is about."

One encouraging development for people facing uncontrolled type 1 diabetes comes in the form of a simple surgery. The procedure takes healthy, functioning pancreatic islets—clusters of cells that contain insulin-producing beta cells—from an organ donor and transplants them into a patient's liver. Doctors at City of Hope have already performed the surgery on a limited number of patients and have seen promising results.

While islet transplantation eventually may lead to a cure for diabetes, challenges remain in making it practical. Once islets have been donated, for example, how can they be isolated and kept functional? How do researchers distinguish good islets from bad without wasting the good ones during testing?

Through the Caltech-City of Hope Biomedical Research Initiative, researchers and clinicians are working hand-in-hand to answer these important questions.

At the event, researchers told the story and explained the science behind their project. Fouad Kandeel, chair and professor in the Department of Clinical Diabetes, Endocrinology, and Metabolism at City of Hope, and his colleague, Kevin Ferreri, associate research professor in the Division of Developmental and Translational Diabetes and Endocrine Research, have been working on islet cell transplantation as a treatment for their patients with type 1 diabetes. Yet existing methods of selecting islets took too much time, involved too much labor, and used up too many islets.

That is where the Caltech partners came in. Yu-Chong Tai, the Anna L. Rosen Professor of Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, and Hyuck Choo, assistant professor of electrical engineering and medical engineering, invented a novel device that can screen individual islets. The microfluidic platform accurately determines the health of an islet sample by applying glucose and measuring the sample's reaction. In less than a year, the team has designed a proof-of-concept platform.

Once the device is perfected, Choo believes the team will be able to easily scale it up and even use its technology to help overcome other clinical challenges.

"This is the perfect opportunity for medical engineering at Caltech," says Choo. "We want to create technology-based solutions to large-scale societal health issues, like diabetes."

This term, students in Biology 1—Principles of Biology—were offered a novel alternative to the traditional final exam: the opportunity to create a two-to-four-minute video explaining some aspect of biology in an interesting, entertaining and, yes, musical way.

Bi 1 is a large lecture course for nonmajors and, for most of them, as close as they will come to biology during their undergraduate career. As the class's instructor, Dianne Newman, professor of biology and geobiology, explains, "It's almost an absurd challenge. How do you teach biology in a substantive and engaging way in 10 weeks to students whose primary interests lie elsewhere?"

Newman found at least one way to meet that challenge. "I have a mid-session break in my class because it's an hour and a half long," says Newman. "After 45 minutes, I show a short video that relates to the content of my lecture just to break things up, to give students a chance to stretch and reengage." One day in April, Professor Newman showed a rap video on Hox gene development created by Stanford students. "The Hox genes are regulatory genes in eukaryotes that are critical for development," says Newman. "It was such a clever video. And so, off the cuff, I said to my Bi 1 students, 'These Stanford kids are pretty good. If any of you can come up with something equally outstanding, I'll give you an automatic A in the class.'"

After class, to Newman's surprise, a student came up to ask exactly what the rules were for this automatic A. If they did a video, could they skip the midterm? Could they skip the final? What about the assignment requiring students to write a hypothesis-driven paper on a topic of their choice? Disarmed, Newman promised she would soon send the class an email that would explain it all. She reflected on the idea and then laid out the rules for the Bi 1 video challenge: an automatic A on just the final exam, but only if the video adhered to a stringent set of rules regarding originality, scientific content, and aesthetic value.

Newman was skeptical anyone would take on the challenge, but in the end, six videos were submitted. All were screened on June 4, the last day of class. All of the students in the class were given clickers to vote on each video—giving it an A, B, or C, based on how well the video fulfilled the criteria. Newman promised to take their votes into consideration as she made her decisions about the adequacy of each video. Newman further enlisted some special A-list guests to attend the showing and give their reactions: Harry Gray, the Arnold O. Beckman Professor of Chemistry and founding director of the Beckman Institute; Jonas Peters, the Bren Professor of Chemistry; Cindy Weinstein, vice provost and professor of English; and Bil Clemons, professor of biochemistry. As an added surprise to the students, President Thomas Rosenbaum stopped in for the viewing.

Student videos covered a range of topics, from photosynthesis to metabolism to respiration, and employed a variety of styles, with each video showcasing the unique personalities and creative talents of their creators. Tyler Perez (freshman, planetary science) and Nicholas Meyer (freshman, physics), for example, created a video titled "A Rap about GFP" (GFP, or green fluorescent protein, is used as a marker to visualize protein localization and gene expression). Perez notes that the main challenge was not having a dedicated cameraman, creating the need for "planning the shots beforehand, setting up the tripod, running to the scene to do the acting/dubbing, running back to check the shot, move the camera, repeat."

Rachael Morton (freshman, computer science) and Roohi Dalal (freshman, physics and history) described details about the nuclei of differentiated cells to the tune of Taylor Swift's "Blank Space" in a video they called "Enucleated Space." Morton recalls spending "a few interesting afternoons walking around campus in formal wear, lugging around cameras while lip syncing, as confused-looking tour groups and classmates passed by."

Ashwin Balakrishna (freshman, electrical engineering) and Kelly Woo (freshman, electrical engineering) collaborated on "Photosynthesis," rapping out lyrics like "ATP synthase she the center of it all/I got H+ gradient and now it comes into call" (inspired by Drake's rap video for "Energy"). Woo says, "As corny as this sounds, shooting this video really allowed me to slow down and appreciate how beautiful our campus is."

This may sound like a lot of fun and only a little science, but the Caltech faculty reviewers were impressed. "I'm a little prouder to be a professor at Caltech today," Peters said.

Harry Gray, after viewing the video on respiration created by Ashwin Hari (freshman, computer science) and Hanzhi Lin (freshman, computer science), humorously noted, "I've been studying respiration for a long time, but I learned more in this video than I have in 30 years. I hope you guys will make a lot more videos. I'm going to come to all of them so I don't have to spend all that time reading stupid journals."
 

While reviewing freshman Tara Shankar's (freshman, computer science) video, "Metabolism, Let's Break it Down," Jonas Peters tried to recruit the computer science major to chemistry. He even offered a powerful incentive: "If Professor Newman doesn't give you an A on the final for this video, you can take any course in CCE [the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering], and we will give you an A."

After the last video was shown, Peters, on a more serious note, drew students' attention to all the opportunities that they—as nonmajors in biology—could bring to biology from their very different "corners of the campus."

"Professor Newman's enthusiasm for the class was mirrored by the joie de vivre of the students, who sang, danced, and rapped their way through the central themes of Bi 1," says Weinstein. "Seeing students bring such intelligence, creativity, and downright fun to their studies reminds us of the rewards that come to teachers who inspire."

So did these students earn their prize, the opportunity to spend another afternoon singing and dancing their way across campus while their fellow Bi 1 students grind out their final? The jury—a one-woman jury named Dianne Newman—is still out, but it looks as though the Bi 1 video challenge will be finding its way onto her next Bi 1 syllabus.

In a new class called Design and Construction of Programmable Molecular Systems (BE/CS 196a), taught this term by Assistant Professor of Bioengineering Lulu Qian, undergraduate and graduate students in computer science, computation and neural systems, and bioengineering came together to study a new intersection of their fields: biomolecular computation. "Molecular programming is a really young research field that only has a couple of decades of history," said Qian, introducing the class's final project presentations on Friday, June 5. "But it offers a huge potential for transforming all molecular sciences into information technology."

In recent years, in order to "program" synthetic DNA sequences to accomplish a diverse range of functions, bioengineers have begun to take advantage of their ability to predict how DNA strands interact, exchange their binding partners, and fold.

Over the course of 10 weeks, three student teams in BE/CS 196a had the chance to specialize in one of the possibilities afforded by this technology. Working in the wet lab—a lab where biochemical materials can be handled in test tubes of liquids—one group attempted to simulate rudimentary neural networks that recognize the presence or absence of DNA strands, each representing information about four Caltech undergrad houses. Another designed molecules to compute multistep logic functions that implement two particular "transition rules" involved in a famous conjecture concerning a theoretical model of computation called "cellular automata."

Students in the third group designed DNA "origami." In DNA origami, a technique first developed at Caltech, DNA molecules automatically fold into prescribed shapes that may contain patterns of attachment sites—like a smiley face or a miniature circuit board—based on the molecules' designated sequence.

As used by Qian's students, junior Aditya Karan, a computer science major, and first-year bioengineering graduate student James Parkin, the process begins with a single-strand loop of DNA—the genome of virus M13, which has over 7,000 nucleotides. "Staples" made of matching sequences are used to connect specific points on the loop, so that these points are pulled together, causing the loop to fold into the desired shape. The team focused their efforts on manipulating a set of microscopic square tiles of DNA. In one experiment they created complex patterns on the surface of the squares; in another they designed the tiles to form heart-shaped arrays consisting of 11 tiles of four distinct types.

Although complete control of molecular systems is a long way off, these technologies offer what is essentially a programming language capable of interfacing with a biochemical environment. DNA folding, for example, could be used to design microscopic "boxes" that open and release a therapeutic drug only under certain chemical conditions on the surface of or inside specific type of cells. "What has kind of amazed us is how much we can get done with just DNA," says Parkin. "With DNA, we can design complicated things from scratch. We can't do that with proteins yet."

As Qian notes, programming molecular systems is an area "full of imagination and creativity."

"That's why I want to share these adventures with Caltech students," she says.

Caltech undergraduate and graduate students have collected an impressive array of awards this year, including three Fulbright grants, two Goldwater Scholarships, two Watson Fellowships, two Hertz Fellowships, a Soros Fellowship, a Marshall Scholarship, a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, and 31 National Science Foundation Fellowships.

Fulbright Fellowships

Seniors Jonathan Liu, Charles Tschirhart, and Caroline Werlang were selected as Fulbright Scholars. The Fulbright Program is the flagship international exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government. Seniors and graduate students who compete in the U.S. Fulbright Student Program can apply to one of the more than 160 countries whose universities are willing to host Fulbright Scholars. The scholarship sponsors one academic year of study or research abroad after the bachelor's degree. Liu, Tschirhart, and Werlang will be studying next year in Germany, England, and Switzerland, respectively.

Barry M. Goldwater Scholarships

Sophomore Saaket Agrawal and junior Paul Dieterle were awarded Barry M. Goldwater scholarships for the 2015–16 academic year. The Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program was established by Congress in 1986 to award scholarships to college students who intend to pursue research careers in science, mathematics, and engineering.

Thomas J. Watson Fellowships

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

Hertz Fellowships

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

Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans

Mohamad Abedi, a PhD candidate in bioengineering, received a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. Thirty fellows, selected from nearly 1,200 applicants "for their potential to make significant contributions to U.S. society, culture, or their academic field," receive up to $90,000 to help cover two years of tuition, and other educational and living expenses, while studying any subject at any university in the United States. The fellowship was established to assist young new Americans—permanent residents, naturalized citizens, or children of naturalized citizen parents—at critical points in their educations.

Gates Cambridge Scholarship

Senior Connie Hsueh, a physics major, was awarded a 2015 Gates Cambridge Scholarship that will fund graduate studies at the University of Cambridge. The Gates Cambridge Scholarship program, established in 2000 through a donation to Cambridge University from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, recognizes young people from around the world who not only excel academically, but also display a commitment to social issues and bettering the world. Hsueh was selected from a pool of 755 applicants.

Marshall Scholarship

Senior Adam Jermyn received the 2015 Marshall Scholarship to pursue graduate studies in Great Britain. Funded by the British government, the Marshall Scholarship provides support for two years of post–bachelor's degree study—covering a student's tuition, books, living expenses, and transportation costs—at any university in the United Kingdom. Each year more than 900 students from across the nation compete for this prestigious scholarship.

NSF Graduate Research Fellowships

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

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

Caltech's class of 2015 is group of smart, creative, and curious individuals. They are analytical thinkers, performers, researchers, engineers, athletes, and leaders who are ready to apply the lessons they have learned from Caltech's rigorous academic environment and the unique experiences they had as part of this close-knit community to pursue future challenges. 

We talked to two of these graduates, Phoebe Ann and Justin Koch, about their years at Caltech and what will come next.

Other graduates share their stories in videos posted on Caltech's Facebook page.

Watch as they and their peers are honored at Caltech's 121st commencement on June 12 at 10 a.m. If you can't be in Pasadena, the ceremony will be live-streamed at http://www.ustream.tv/caltech. You may also follow the action and share your favorite commencement moments on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram by using #Caltech2015 in your tweets and postings.

Phoebe Ann

Major: Biology and English
House: Lloyd
Hometown: Irvine, California

Why did you originally decide to come to Caltech?

I was attracted by the small class size, and I've found to this day that it is one of Caltech's strongest advantages. Caltech is also extremely supportive of a student's individual endeavors, as demonstrated by the numerous awards and programs that promote independent research, volunteer work, or extracurricular interest projects. The most significant example of this is the Caltech Y, through which I was able to learn how to implement a personal idea or passion into a tangible program that my fellow students and I can all enjoy.

Were you involved in extracurricular activities at Caltech?

My most significant extracurricular activities were implemented through the Caltech Y. My proudest accomplishments were organizing alternative spring break trips to New York for Hurricane Sandy relief and to Costa Rica for community construction. Prior to Caltech, I had never traveled independently, let alone led a group of students to a foreign country. These activities were absolutely crucial to developing myself into an effective community member and future physician.

What were your most memorable experiences?

Aside from my Caltech Y activities, my most memorable experiences were interactions with my fellow Lloydies during freshman year. It was an exciting time of realizing my similarities and differences with others, as well as my ability to function without sleep.

What did you not know about Caltech that you learned after being here?

I did not know how hard Caltech pushed its students. I struggled tremendously upon arriving at Caltech because I was intimidated by all the students who seemed "naturally" intelligent. But Caltech forced me to just shut up and get to work. And when all was said and done, I was able to accomplish so much more than I had ever imagined.

What will you be doing after Caltech?

I will be studying medicine at Feinberg Medical School at Northwestern University in Chicago. After, I would like to be a surgeon or a pediatrician, depending on how well I can maintain a work-life balance.

Any words of advice to incoming students?

Join the Caltech Y! It is critical not only to find a work-life balance outside of the house system, but also to ground your scientific endeavors in a broader purpose: to serve and better your local, national, and international community.