This is Caltech

Caltech is a world-renowned research university that develops cutting-edge technologies, addresses fundamental scientific questions, and pursues solutions to the world's greatest challenges. The Institute is defined by its people: faculty, students, postdoctoral scholars, alumni, and staff who collaborate across disciplines, launch new fields of study, and expand human knowledge.

Transformative Research

Caltech trailblazers paved the way for modern computing and smartphones when they created very-large-scale integration (VLSI), the process of combining millions to billions of transistors into a complex digital system on a single silicon chip.

Credit: Shutterstock/Oleksiy Mark

Caltech neuroscientists have created neuroprosthetics that can interpret the intentions of patients with paralysis, allowing them to control assistive devices.

Caltech researchers discovered the link between automobile exhaust and smog, and the existence of toxic lead in many materials around the world, both of which prompted the development of environmental and consumer protections.

Caltech seismologists invented the Richter scale in 1935 to measure earthquake magnitude and also developed its successor, the moment magnitude scale.

Discipline-Defining Leaders

Kip Thorne (BS '62) and Barry Barish, physicists with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the first detection of gravitational waves—ripples in space-time—emanating from merging black holes.

Bioengineer Pamela Björkman is developing a universal coronavirus vaccine that will provide protection against SARS-CoV-2 variants and other coronaviruses.

Alum Leroy Hood (BS '60, PhD '68) invented the automated DNA sequencer, which helped launch the field of genomics and enabled the Human Genome Project.

Electrical engineer Azita Emami developed a pressure-sensing eye implant that could help glaucoma patients monitor their condition and prevent blindness.

Cutting-Edge Innovation

The Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies (CAST) is developing self-driving robots, including prototypes for an autonomous flying ambulance and drone swarms that will provide support during a natural disaster.

Researchers at Caltech showed that neutron star mergers are behind the creation of some heavy elements, such as gold and platinum.

Credit: National Science Foundation/LIGO/Sonoma State University/A. Simonnet

Caltech's neuroscience researchers have probed the psychology of the stock market, pinpointed neural regions that govern economic anxiety, and identified neurons that alert your brain when you make a mistake.

Caltech's Space Solar Power Project (SSPP) was the first to wirelessly transmit power in space, a demonstration of the technology that could one day allow humans to harvest power in space and beam it to Earth.