News & Events

11-18-16

Caltech senior trustee Charles Trimble (BS '63, MS '64), founder and former chief executive officer of Trimble Navigation, Ltd., is the 2016 recipient of the International von Kármán Wings Award. He was recognized for his visionary leadership contributions to the aerospace industry, and distinguished service to the nation's defense and aerospace programs. "In addition to his pioneering contributions to GPS commercialization, Charlie has had a big impact on Caltech and JPL," Professor Gharib stated. "As an alumnus and trustee, he deeply understands the needs of Caltech and serves the community with dedication and insight." [Caltech story]

Tags: Charles Trimble Morteza Gharib GALCIT ESE honors

11-10-16

Rolf H. Sabersky, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Emeritus, passed away on October 24, 2016 at the age of 96.  Professor Sabersky joined the faculty in 1949 having obtained his BS ’42, MS ’43, and PhD ’49 from Caltech in Mechanical Engineering. He became professor emeritus in 1988.  He worked with luminaries throughout his distinguished career including Theodore von Kármán at Aerojet. James Van Allan sought his expertise for the development of the Ajax and Bumblebee rocket programs.  Professor Sabersky made pioneering contributions to our understanding of boiling heat transfer, free convection, granular flows, and indoor air quality. He taught courses in thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, and heat transfer.  He was renowned for his commitment to education, mentoring, and promoting diversity. He was the author of two popular textbooks, Elements of Engineering Thermodynamics, and Fluid Flow: A First course in Fluid Mechanics, which he coauthored with Professor Allan Acosta. He received the Heat Transfer Memorial Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1977.

Tags: Rolf Sabersky MCE research highlights EAS history

11-09-16

Electrical Engineering graduate student Chun-Lin Liu, working with Professor Vaidyanathan, has received the best paper prize for his paper entitle, “Two-Dimensional Sparse Arrays with Hole-Free Coarray and Reduced Mutual Coupling". The prize was presented to him at the 50th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers. [Read the paper]

Tags: P. P. Vaidyanathan Chun-Lin Liu EE honors research highlights

10-28-16

Students participating in Caltech's Data Visualization program aim to tackle cumbersome data-manipulation problem such as how to drive a rover on Mars from a command room on Earth. One of the goals of the program is to develop innovative software to streamline the ways in which scientists and engineers visually manipulate their data. "We use a human-centered design methodology," Professor Mushkin says. "Design students create sketches and ask the researchers to 'interact' with them by pointing, talking, shuffling, and annotating the paper, while computer science students create rough drafts of a variety of possible approaches to coding the visualization." [Caltech story]

Tags: Hillary Mushkin CMS MCE research highlights

10-28-16

Professor 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. His research is informed by—and has applications for—diverse arenas such as weather prediction, carbon sequestration, personalized medicine, and crowd forecasting. [Interview with Prof. Stuart]

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10-27-16

Brent Fultz, Barbara and Stanley R. Rawn, Jr., Professor of Materials Science and Applied Physics, and colleagues have discovered a new way that heat tweaks the physical properties of a material. The potential value to engineers lies in the fact that it is much easier to raise the temperature of a material than it is to place it under the sort of pressure needed to force an electronic topological transition. [Caltech story]

Tags: Brent Fultz APhMS research highlights

10-14-16

Venkat Chandrasekaran, Assistant Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences and Electrical Engineering, is a winner of the 2016 INFORMS Optimization Society Prize for Young Researchers for his paper Relative Entropy Relaxations for Signomial Optimization. The prize is awarded for an outstanding paper in optimization and serves as a recognition of promising colleagues who are at the beginning of their academic or industrial career. [List of winners]

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10-11-16

Beverley McKeon, Professor of Aeronautics and Associate Director of the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories, has been elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) “for experimental and theoretical contributions to advancing the understanding of wall turbulence and for elegant interdisciplinary approaches to modeling and flow manipulation.” [APS Fellow Archive]

Tags: Beverley McKeon GALCIT fluid dynamics honors

10-11-16

Harry A. Atwater, Jr., Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science; Director of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, has been elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) “for pioneering contributions to plasmonics and nanophotonics.” [APS Fellow Archive]

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10-10-16

Changhuei Yang, Professor of Electrical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Medical Engineering, and colleagues have created the visual analogue of noise-canceling headphones—a camera system that can obtain images of objects obscured by murky media, such as fog or clouds, by canceling out the glare. Their device selectively cancels the scattered light, leaving only the light that is reflected or bounced off the objects and has slipped back through the murk unmolested. [Caltech story]

Tags: Changhuei Yang EE MedE research highlights