Andrew Sinclair came to Caltech as a visiting assistant professor in 2022. Finding Caltech to be an ideal place to carry out his research on Chinese finance, he has stayed on. Sinclair continues to pursue his research and teach Caltech students about finance through courses titled Hedge Funds, International Trade and Finance, and, of course, […]

The growth of bacterial colonies, the piling up of snow during a storm, and the spread of a wildfire are random, seemingly unrelated events, yet they all follow universal mathematical laws. Caltech's new assistant professor of mathematics Lingfu Zhang wants to elucidate the math behind these growth patterns and understand how and why the math […]

Mansi Kasliwal (PhD '11), a Caltech professor of astronomy, has been named the new director of Caltech's Palomar Observatory, while Dimitri Mawet, the David Morrisroe Professor of Astronomy at Caltech, has been named the new director of instrumentation of the Caltech Optical Observatories (COO), which includes Palomar as well as the W. M. Keck Observatory […]

Hundreds of different types of neurons make up the neural circuits in our brains. Over the years, scientists have discovered many details about those different cell types, including their electrical properties and the early genetic indicators that dictate what type of neuron they will eventually become. Yet combining all of that varied information into a […]

Kip Thorne (BS '62)—theoretical astrophysicist, Distinguished Alumnus, and Nobel laureate—will deliver the keynote address at Caltech's 132nd annual Commencement ceremony on June 12, 2026.Thorne was a seminal figure in the discovery of gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of space and time that provide an unprecedented window into the physics of some of the most energetic […]

When a gas is highly energized, its electrons get torn from the parent atoms, resulting in a plasma—the oft-forgotten fourth state of matter (along with solid, liquid, and gas). When we think of plasmas, we normally think of extremely hot phenomena such as the Sun, lightning, or maybe arc welding, but there are situations in […]

As nearly one in six couples experience fertility issues, in-vitro fertilization (IVF) is an increasingly common form of reproductive technology. However, there are still many unanswered scientific questions about the basic biology of embryos, including the factors determining their viability, that, if resolved, could ultimately improve IVF's success rate.A new study from Caltech examines mouse […]

Foremother Love: Phillis Wheatley and Black Feminist Criticism, published by Duke University Press in July 2025 and authored by Dana Murphy, Assistant Professor of Black Studies and English, honors the writing of Phillis Wheatley (Peters)—a Black woman who lived in colonial North America/New England in the latter half of the 18th century whose work was […]

Kenny Lau, a postdoctoral scholar research associate and experimental cosmologist in the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA), passed away on November 22, 2025. He was 36 years old.Lau first joined the Caltech community as a visiting graduate student in 2021. In 2023, he became a postdoctoral scholar in the Observational Cosmology group, working […]

Snap a picture of a busy or complex scene—perhaps a crosswalk in Manhattan or a cluttered family room. Now imagine being able to click on any object in that scene, no matter how occluded or small it might be, and reconstruct that object in three dimensions. Meta Superintelligence Labs recently released an open-source tool called […]