Person Spotlight Listing
- Postdoctoral Scholar Research Associate in Chemistry
Melissa Ramirez
My dad came here to Caltech to work at Browne Dining Hall. Being a postdoc at Caltech brings my academic journey full circle. I get to conduct research in a laboratory space, and I’ve gotten opportunities he and many others don’t get a chance to have. My background as a first-generation Latina shapes the leader that I am today. It keeps me grounded and reminds me of the privilege that I have to serve the local and global community through science.”
- Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Yaser Abu-Mostafa (PhD '83)
I’ve spent two-thirds of my life at Caltech. This is my home. It is completely the environment where I can be productive, where I want to help, where I want the students to flourish, where I want good things to happen. It’s a place where you have lots of room to think and to research and to imagine.”
- Professor of English and Dean of Undergraduate Students
Jennifer Jahner
COVID brought home just how deeply our sense of the world is shaped by faith in the reliability of our forecasting models. The experience had me reflecting on the period I research and asking, What did a ‘forecast’ look like in an era before probability calculus and statistics? I realized that many of the core questions we struggle with today are present in these much earlier periods of history but reveal themselves in different ways—some familiar, some radically distinct.”
- Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Neuroscience and Biological Engineering; Allen V. C. Davis and Lenabelle Davis Leadership Chair and Director of the Richard N. Merkin Institute for Translational Research
Viviana Gradinaru (BS '05)
Caltech germinates entirely new fields of sciences, through our faculty but also through our students and postdocs in their post-Caltech careers. Through the Merkin Institute, we have a vehicle to channel such discoveries into novel ways to understand and improve the human experience."
- Graduate student, neurobiology
Jieyu Zheng
Doing a PhD, it's kind of like you are learning and contributing at the same time. You are trying to construct your own science story. You are trying to shine the light on an unknown fact to the rest of the world. And at the same time, you learn all these skills that will help you uncover more in the future."
- George Ellery Hale Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Science
Shri Kulkarni
The ideal scientist is supposed to ask questions and seek answers—I've never been that. I really like to build instruments, or as I sometimes call them, toys, and play with them to discover the universe. I think it's a very different approach to science, which is, in some sense, based on a combination of engineering and curiosity rather than a more theoretical approach."