Campaign Priorities
Break Through: The Caltech Campaign will ensure the ability to explore and innovate for Caltech, its researchers, and the students who represent the future. The campaign will raise funds to support three key objectives:
1) Enable Caltech to Take Smart Risks
2) Provide an Exceptional Educational Experience
3) Seed and Support High-Impact Research Areas
Use the drop-down menu to explore campaign priority areas and view stories of impact.
Space Is the Place: Couple’s Generosity Launches New Graduate Fellowships
Since he saw Sputnik 1 as a child, Caltech trustee and Distinguished Alumni Award winner David W. Thompson (MS ’78) has been reaching for the stars.
Caltech Mentor’s Legacy Lives on through a New Graduate Fellowship
Anneila Sargent (MS ’67, PhD ’78), Caltech’s Ira S. Bowen Professor of Astronomy, Emeritus, has made a gift to establish the Wallace L. W. Sargent Fellowship. With this fellowship, she is supporting tomorrow’s scientists and engineers while also honoring her late husband. Wallace “Wal” Sargent, former Ira S. Bowen Professor of Astronomy, served on the Caltech faculty from 1966 until his death in 2012.
The Synthesist
Like many who come to Caltech to learn and explore, undergraduate Damien Bérubé dreams of changing the world with science and engineering. But his personal vision—the force that drives him in the classroom, the lab, and beyond—is an uncommon one.
The Possibilities are Mote and Remote
Azita Emami’s work in high-speed data communications led to a breakthrough that could spare millions of people the need to prick themselves with needles.
In Search of Alien Planets
Erik Petigura marvels at how far his field of astronomy has come since his childhood in the early 1990s, when he first became hooked on science after watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series.
Go Ahead, Jump
The ballerina is an avatar of certain qualities—among them the ambition, skill, and courage to take bold leaps. Offstage, ballet lover Rachel Theios has infused those same characteristics into her budding research career in astronomy. Pursuing her first publication as a Caltech graduate student, she has shown the vision and bravery to question some of the fundamentals of her field.
Science and Serendipity
Caltech graduate student Manuel Razo Mejia wants to predict how evolution occurs in organisms ranging from microbes to humans. Until recently, evolution has been considered a random process, but Razo Mejia believes we might detect certain patterns by applying the principles of physics and mathematics. To unravel the mystery of how biological systems change over time, he observes gene regulation in single-celled bacteria, whose brief life cycles enable him to witness change at an accelerated rate.
A Multifaceted Gift to Caltech Grows from Gratitude
When asked what makes his alma mater special, Roger Davisson (BS ’65, MS ’66) frames his thoughts with a literary allusion. “Walt Whitman wrote, ‘I contain multitudes,’” he says. “Well, Caltech contains multitudes. The Institute has some of the brightest and best minds, and they gather across disciplines in a way that I don’t think happens elsewhere. For a small school, the amount of stuff that’s going on is truly remarkable.”