On April 11, Caltech students traveled to the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden in Arcadia for a Make-A-Difference Day service project organized by the Caltech Y. Volunteers spent the morning removing Algerian ivy from tree trunks and root systems, helping protect the Arboretum’s plant life from invasive overgrowth. The 127-acre Arboretum, established as a public garden in 1947, sits on historic Rancho Santa Anita, once known to the native Tongva people as Aleupkigna, or “the place of many waters.”
As Thomas F. Rosenbaum prepares to conclude twelve years as Caltech’s president, the Institute stands between continuity and transition. Under Rosenbaum’s tenure, Caltech expanded its physical campus, deepened its investment in quantum science and sustainability, increased the proportion of Pell-eligible students, and navigated a turbulent national climate for higher education and federally funded research. In July, Ray Jayawardhana will become Caltech’s next president. Rosenbaum spoke with the Tech about unfinished work, student well-being, federal science policy, JPL, the role of universities in American democracy, and what should remain stubbornly Caltech.
On a Saturday afternoon this spring, part of Caltech’s inaugural Integrated Core cohort found itself somewhere few first-year lab sections go: wandering the aisles of Home Depot. They were looking for tubing, buckets, connectors, and whatever else might help them build small-scale carbon capture systems from scratch. One group was growing algae.
NASA announced on May 22 that it will open the next contract to manage and operate the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to competition, marking a potentially significant change in the nearly seven-decade relationship among NASA, Caltech, and JPL. Caltech has managed JPL for NASA since 1958, when the laboratory was transferred from the U.S. Army to the newly established space agency. JPL itself traces its origins to Caltech researchers in 1936.
On May 27, California Senator Adam Schiff visited Caltech for a tour that moves from the hardware of quantum computing to the philosophical puzzles of quantum mechanics. Schiff, joined by his wife Eve, toured Professor Manuel Endres’ lab, met with President Thomas F. Rosenbaum, and spoke with John Preskill about entanglement, hidden variables, many worlds, time travel, and what Feynman might have thought of AI-generated Feynman lectures. Schiff came to campus not as a passive dignitary, but as a self-described quantum enthusiast.
Serving as Editor-in-Chief of The California Tech has meant learning that a newspaper is never simply present to itself. Each issue arrives as if final (laid out/proofed/printed/distributed), but it is also always provisional. A trace of arguments not fully resolved, conversations still unfolding, absences we could not quite make visible, and futures we did not yet know how to name.
On May 16, in Frautschi Hall, Katherine Vondy’s The Heat of the Sun’s Rays received a staged reading as part of MACH 33, Caltech’s festival of new science-driven plays. Two earlier glimpses of the play had already entered the campus conversation: on April 11, during festival auditions at TACIT House, and on April 21 — during Earth Week — when the Resnick Sustainability Center hosted a reading of a selection from the script.
On the night of May 19, Blacker Hovse summoned students to quite the chimerical Interhovse: Ancient Egypt by way of glowstick fever dream. The invitation arrived less as an announcement than an incantation — “The pharaoh’s curse beckons you” — calling partygoers to “flood the courtyard at 10pm sharp” for what it promised would be a “body thumping blood pumping rave inside the neon pyramid.”
Federal authorities have identified Cole Thomas Allen, a 31-year-old Torrance man, as the suspect in the April 25 shooting incident at the Washington Correspondents’ Dinner, where President Trump and senior administration officials were in attendance. Allen has pleaded not guilty to charges including attempting to assassinate the president, after prosecutors alleged that he traveled from California to Washington, D.C., checked into the Washington Hilton, and tried to breach security near the ballroom while armed.
A recent cybersecurity incident involving Canvas, the learning-management system operated by Instructure and used throughout Caltech, disrupted universities during exams week and raised concerns about the possible exposure of user data. Instructure claims it detected unauthorized activity on April 29 and additional related activity on May 7, when some users saw altered Canvas pages; the company temporarily placed Canvas in maintenance mode and later tied the access path to its Free-For-Teacher account system.
