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.”
On May 19, an anonymous Reddit user posted in r/Caltech, a Reddit forum for Caltech-related posts, alleging food safety, sanitation, and workplace issues at Browne Dining Hall. The post appeared under the username “No-Environment-3923” and was titled “PSA from a former cook: Be very careful eating at Caltech Dining Halls (Browne).” The Tech messaged the user through Reddit, who accepted the message request but did not reply before the account was deleted.
Hello everyone from Housing and Dining Services! As the final stretch of the academic year wraps up, we want to take a moment to congratulate all of our students on completing another incredible term. To our graduating seniors, congratulations! We are so incredibly proud of everything you’ve accomplished during your time at Caltech, and we wish you the absolute best on your next adventure.
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.
There’s a particular kind of audacity required to fail spectacularly at being a cocktail waitress and somehow turn that failure into a career-defining opportunity. Melissa Magsaysay has made a career out of this kind of alchemy—transforming what others might see as limitations into launching pads, and using fashion journalism to reshape who gets to be seen and heard in an industry notorious for its gatekeeping. Today, as host of the LA Times Studios podcast “Living Well,” a contributing writer for Business of Fashion and Vogue Philippines, and co-founder of Duster—a fashion brand built around the Filipino house dress—Magsaysay has become something her 11-year-old self, thumbing through fashion magazines in the San Francisco Bay Area, might not have imagined: a voice who uses fashion as a lens to examine larger questions of representation and cultural heritage.
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.
All 22 members of the National Science Board (NSB), which oversees the National Science Foundation (NSF), were removed on April 24 without explanation. Members were notified by email that their positions were “terminated, effective immediately.” They included Aaron Dominguez (BS ’92), the board’s vice chair and provost of the Catholic University of America, and board member Matthew Malkan (PhD ’83), a UCLA professor.
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.
