I came to Caltech for multiple reasons the most pertinent of them is just the
collaborative nature and the strong sense of identity and most important to
me is the research-based education.
I'd felt a yearning one might say always to
come back to Caltech after graduating. There was something very special about
Caltech which was a really true and passionate love of science that I felt here.
This is really not just uncommon but non-existent anywhere else.
What you could see about Caltech is that people
take on problems that might seem impossible.
I was so naive I didn't really know how difficult it was to
engineer proteins reliably but because I was in a place where people routinely
did that I wasn't afraid of doing it.
So I'm particularly interested in
self-propelled nano particles. I use computer simulation to really understand
how these things work. There's no potential that you're the first person
to really look at this behavior and then being like the person who's actually
pushing the boundary forward is kind of why I get up in the morning.
The division of Geological and Planetary Sciences wanted to bring someone to Caltech who had an
interest in studying questions related to the history of life on the planet but
for that person to be able to bring tools of molecular biology to bear on
those questions. And that was something that I was beginning to develop and they
took a chance on me and hired me.
Caltech is a very adventurous place. They love risk-taking.
People are not afraid to fail and in my case I'm interested in
combining neuroscience and economics which are two fields that are
traditionally very far apart but there's a lot of interesting stuff to do there.
Caltech realizes that some of the most important questions facing our society
today are ones that are not going to be solved overnight. They're questions that
demand innovation at every level. It takes time to do that.
Time to sit and concentrate
which is one of the most valuable resources a scientists at least
a theorist can ask for.
What LIGO has done is to open up for the first time an
ability to see this aspect of the universe that lives side by side with
stars and planets and yet has never been seen before.
It gives humans for the first time the possibility
to learn about the warped side of the universe.
My research is in computational biology. It's not just
that we do experiments and then go and analyze the data. The computer science is
developing the technology and experiments and they can be used to
better understand the molecular biology of the cell and also developing
diagnostics for health applications.
I combine quantum information theory with thermodynamics.
This combination informs our basic fundamental understanding of
the flow of time, how efficiently we can process information,
and other fundamental ideas.
You can make an incredibly long list of the awards that
have been won by Caltech faculty and alumni. It reads as a who's who of
science. But what does that mean? That means that their work has had a huge
impact on the way science is done, on technology, and on the way we live today.
Caltech is changing the world in a number of different ways. One is just the
cutting edge research which leads to new technologies, but I think also the
students that come out of Caltech too. These students go to other places and take
what they've learned here and they're able to share that knowledge.
Caltech does train the next scientists and I think it's really cool to be part of that group.
I feel like every time I turn around, I see someone who has invented a
new field. It makes me want to strive to make the quality of my work
not just very good, but extraordinary.
Break through, the theme of our campaign, reflects the courage of those who are in
our environment to be able to push themselves to break through to the next level.