Caltech Magazine

29/11/2025

Curtis Lee, who grew up in Hong Kong and went to high school in England, began cooking at age 11. At 15, Lee trained with Michelin-starred chef Maxime Gilbert in Hong Kong, and he was a stagiaire at several top restaurants in London, including Muse by Tom Aikens and The Fat Duck. In total, he has trained under chefs who hold a combined 42 Michelin stars. At Caltech, Lee is a teaching assistant in SA 16 Cooking Basics. He plans to double major in chemical engineering and business, economics, and management.

“Last year, I wanted to start playing with fermentation. So, I made a list of things I wanted to make and thought, ‘What’s the best way to make them?’ I was reading around online and found that I needed to have good control of temperature and humidity, so I decided to make my very own fermentation chamber using a speed rack, PID [proportional–integral–derivative] controller, and small heater. I started to make soy sauce, kombucha, sauerkraut, kimchi, and hot sauce! I’m not much of a baker, but I’ve been working on sourdough and pastries recently. The fermentation chamber really comes in handy to keep my starter happy or to proof my croissants.

I love learning about different cuisines from around the world. Even if you don’t know anything more about a place, if you’re able to talk to someone about a very niche dish from their homeland, they get so surprised. Then they tell you things you don’t know, and you learn even more. Many of my housemates in Avery are Indian, and I met some of their parents when I was in the kitchen cooking Indian food. So, I talked to them about it. I like to use the proper names for everything, and they got so excited. I just love that.”

25/11/2025

Nearly 10 million people around the world living with type 1 diabetes must perform a daily series of finger pricks, injections, and insulin pump applications in order to manage their condition. As a bioengineering graduate student at Caltech, Alborz Mahdavi (PhD ’15) believed molecular science held the power to transform the treatment of diseases. He was especially drawn to the scientific challenge of diabetes treatment and how to mimic biological processes for glucose management.

“This was a perfect problem for someone from Caltech to take on because it’s so technically challenging that most people would essentially write it off as impossible,” says Mahdavi, who studied with David A. Tirrell, the Ross McCollum-William H. Corcoran Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. “It was a problem that needed not only a solution but an elegant one. Building an extremely complicated molecule wouldn’t be practical for industry.”

Learn more: https://magazine.caltech.edu/post/alborz-mahdavi-insulin

22/11/2025

“I have a huge attachment to [Sergei Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2]. It’s supposed to evoke the entire spectrum of feelings and emotions, and it’s my job as soloist to lead the audience through that journey with me—working with the conductor who leads the orchestra to match that energy. Everybody has a different instrument and a different way they think of this piece, but the idea is to bring them all to unity.

“In many ways, it’s like running a research group: I have a certain vision for how the group should be, but everybody comes with their own ideas, their own backgrounds. My group, in particular, is very diverse and interdisciplinary—even for Caltech. We have students from chemical engineering, materials science, applied physics, a lot of mechanical engineers and medical engineers with different backgrounds, cultures, and perspectives. I cherish that. That’s part of what makes our group so successful—when we work together productively, the output is greater than the sum of its parts.

“So the analogy is pretty apt between leading a team and playing with an orchestra—but I have to say it’s much more nerve-wracking to be playing a solo with an orchestra.”

—Julia R. Greer is the Ruben F. and Donna Mettler Professor of Materials Science, Mechanics and Medical Engineering; Executive Officer for Applied Physics and Materials Science. She performed as piano soloist playing Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2—mvt.1 with the Caltech Orchestra this November.

19/11/2025

Solving big problems takes a little perseverance. Or, sometimes, a lot. This basic truth underlies the mission to answer the big questions in astronomy, biology, chemistry, renewable energy, and every other field of scientific endeavor. In the Fall 2025 issue, we explore how Caltech researchers stick with research when the answers may not come for years, decades, or generations: https://magazine.caltech.edu/post/perseverance-in-science

06/11/2025

"Nearly 20 percent of my study's participants report feeling like they are addicted to Instagram. But using a clinical addiction scale, less than 2.5 percent of people actually meet the criteria for being at risk for clinical Instagram addiction. The real percentage of addicts is likely even smaller, because a professional needs to diagnose those in the at-risk group and likely won’t diagnose all of that 2.5 percent. Yet it's colloquially accepted to call it an addiction. Our research has found it's more productive to think of social media use as a habit rather than an addiction—it helps people make better choices and feel more in control. Adopting the framework of addiction can actually be stigmatizing and harmful.

“I used to be a social media consultant at a PR firm, so I know that apps are intentionally designed to create strong habits. I got interested in understanding what they were doing to people and the information ecosystem, so I left and went to grad school to study social psychology; I'm fascinated by social media's psychological effects. For example, things like engagement-based incentives actually drive the spread of misinformation, so don't feel bad if it feels like it's hard to control your usage. It's designed that way."

—Ian Anderson is a postdoctoral scholar in the laboratory of Dean Mobbs, professor of cognitive neuroscience and director and Allen V. C. Davis and Lenabelle Davis Leadership Chair of the Caltech Brain Imaging Center, where he studies social media's effects on the brain using fMRI imaging. Anderson recently spoke on a panel about digital addiction at the USC Institute for Addiction Science.

23/10/2025

“Welcome to Mars.” This is how David Ibbett, composer of Mars Symphony, introduces his piece to the audience. And when he tells them that all the sounds they are about to experience were recorded from the surface of the Red Planet, he feels a chill run down his spine as he watches the awe on their faces.

Produced in collaboration with the Museum of Science in Boston, Ibbett’s Mars Symphony is an audiovisual experience that weaves real sounds and images from our planetary neighbor with a data-driven musical composition performed by a live ensemble. The project draws on research done at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which is managed by Caltech for NASA; Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI); the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian; and ETH Zurich. Mars Symphony will be performed at Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium on Thursday, October 30, at 7:30 p.m.

Register for the event here! https://www.caltech.edu/campus-life-events/calendar/mars-symphony-1

10/10/2025

On September 24, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Florida carrying three new NASA missions into space. One of them, the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP), was led in part by Caltech staff scientist Christina Cohen from the Institute’s Space Radiation Laboratory, who was on hand to watch the launch at Kennedy Space Center.

According to a NASA press release, “The IMAP mission will chart the boundary of the heliosphere, a bubble inflated by the solar wind that shields our solar system from galactic cosmic rays—a key protection that helps make our planet habitable. In addition, the spacecraft will sample and measure solar wind particles streaming outward from the Sun, as well as energetic particles streaming inward from the boundary of our solar system and beyond.”

Cohen told Caltech magazine that seeing her mission head toward the heavens was a moving experience. “The sight and especially the sound of the rocket launching were just incredible,” she says, “particularly knowing it was not only the successful accumulation of so much work but also the beginning of the great science to come. Totally worth waking up in the middle of the night to be there!”

09/10/2025

“The entire school—everyone from the janitors, the support staff, the teachers, all the children and the headmaster—they were all there. School canceled for the afternoon. Standing room only. And I was responsible for presenting the LIGO mosaic and saying something memorable and lasting, so that was pressure.

“I told the kids about the enormous number of questions I would ask at that age at that school—and telling the kids how important the teachers were in my journey because of the time they would take to answer those questions.

“And, of course, I told them that I failed in my first career—which was to become a professional soccer player. The kids found it hilarious that here was me as the deputy director of LIGO, working at Caltech, and that was my second-choice profession.

“The framed version of the LIGO mosaic that the kids helped create is now in an area where they pass by it all the time. I guess it's guerrilla marketing: having the kids seeing this scientific mosaic again and again. Maybe it will spark them into doing something fantastic.”

—Calum Torrie is the head of system science and engineering for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), and the LIGO associate director for Caltech. In June, he visited Cardonald Primary School, his childhood school in Glasgow, Scotland, to talk about his work and present a framed mosaic of 1,156 science-themed pictures made by the pupils, each placed so as to represent the historic gravitational-wave signal picked up by the twin LIGO observatories a decade ago. The visit was organized by researchers from the University of Glasgow, where Torrie is also an honorary research fellow. LIGO is funded by the National Science Foundation and operated by Caltech and MIT, which together conceived and built the project.

01/10/2025

"At first, the club members wanted to break the world record for fastest couch by going 70-plus miles per hour. But then they considered the inherent dangers of breaking the speed limit on a piece of furniture. So, couch 1.0 putters around campus at a genteel 10 miles per hour, tops. Seatbelts are coming soon. Lu says the team drove for an hour on the maiden voyage and did not deplete the on-board battery."

by Andrew Moseman It started, as many great student projects do, with a determination to outdo a rival. Undergraduate Donny Lu and other members of the Caltech Robotics Club had heard about a project in which engineering students at Stanford had affixed two electric skateboards to the bottom of a

25/09/2025

Veronika Voss, a rising second-year from a rural area without many STEM opportunities, knew she wanted to find mentorship the moment she joined Caltech.

Fortunately, during Voss’s first year, the Institute’s Career Achievement, Leadership, and Exploration (CALE) office launched a new initiative: the CALE Alumni Mentoring Program (CAMP). This six-week virtual experience connects Caltech alumni with current students and fosters weekly conversations designed to accelerate career readiness. Voss was part of CAMP’s inaugural cohort in winter 2025.

“Joining CAMP gave me the chance to connect with mentors and to build and maintain a meaningful mentor–mentee relationship,” Voss says.

To facilitate CAMP’s success, the Caltech Alumni Association (CAA) and CALE launched a new platform, the Techer Professional Network (TPN), to optimize alumni and student connections. Formerly known as the Alumni Portal, TPN now hosts CAMP; features a robust job board curated by CALE for Caltech alumni, students, and postdocs; and organizes opt-in regional groups for pilot areas such as Seattle, Silicon Valley, Boston, Washington, D.C., and Singapore to support localized networking.

Learn all about CALE here!
https://magazine.caltech.edu/post/in-motion-cales-new-mentoring-program

18/09/2025

Caltech stage technician Veronica Mullins Bowers is a former Disney Imagineer with extensive experience in sound design, theatre, and themed entertainment, all of which she brings to her work at the Institute.

“I have this personal philosophy of wanting to find the magic in everything, to see the beauty in all the little things that often go overlooked. Being able to see people experience something I made—maybe a fleeting hour and a half of a magical play or the five minutes they’re walking through an alleyway at Disneyland, and they hear this soundtrack that just brings them into the moment. That has always been the absolute best part of what I do, and I like being able to bring the magic of science to people—especially through our Watson and Science Journey lectures.

“Imagineering had been a dream of mine since I was a little kid. I remember seeing some of the first showings of Fantasmic at Disneyland, and when I saw that I thought, whatever that is, that’s what I want to do.

“That really carries over to my job at Caltech. Everything that's magical in this world can be explained by science, and I think that's an incredible thing. It's one of the big things that drew me to Caltech, that emphasis on making our science accessible.

“I like that my job isn’t the same thing every day. One day, I could be running lights, or the sound board, or helping speakers get oriented. With Science Journeys, I might help speakers set up their PowerPoints and displays and make sure they have a venue full of people to share that with. The important thing is creating an event that connects people at Caltech with each other—and the larger community—in a fun way.”

03/09/2025

“I jokingly say that the reason I got added to the Physics Olympiad as a coach was because the head administrator, Tengiz Bibilashvili, was the first professor that ever gave me an F in an undergraduate class. I would like to think that going from failing a physics class under him to studying physics at Caltech ingratiated me in his eyes, and he added me to the Olympiad team as somebody who can represent all types of students.

“As a coach, I took part in the selection of the team, which is a process that includes two exams and a 10-day training camp, after which we determine who will be the five members to travel and represent the U.S. At the camp, I helped to head the experimental side, which is a big distinguishing factor because most of the students do not have experience in labs, which makes up 40 percent of the scoring for the olympiad. They can study in advance for theory, but in terms of labs, you could have somebody who’s totally wicked smart, getting the top scores on every single written exam, but the moment you get them into a lab, they can have literally no idea what they’re doing.

“I found out about the team’s win alongside everyone else. I was watching the award ceremony on the livestream from France at 7:30 in the morning, Pacific time. We already had an indication they were going to all place gold. The students were phenomenal. The real shocker was not that we got first; it was that we were the definitive first place team. That means it was a challenging olympiad, and we still won.”

—Kellan Colburn is a fourth-year doctoral student studying photonic integrated circuits in the lab of Kerry J. Vahala, Caltech’s Ted and Ginger Jenkins Professor of Information Science and Technology and Applied Physics. He received his bachelor’s degree in physics from UC Santa Barbara. Colburn has served as a coach for the U.S. Physics team for three years and is preparing for a fourth. This summer, the 2025 U.S. Physics Team was the only team to achieve five gold medals at the International Physics Olympiad held in July in Paris, France. This was the first time the U.S. achieved such a feat in over 30 years of participating in the event.