These Techers are painting the town green RIPPLE EFFECT
Alumnae insight on the obstacles and opportunities for women in tech MINING THE SKIES
TECH FallMagazineAlumniCaltech•2022 THE LESSON PLAN FOR AI Karina Montilla Edmonds on how edtech can help ensure educational equity THE SUSTAINABLE CITY
Joel Sercel is pursuing the promise of asteroid mining
“The beauty is that, when it works, the farmers are making more money, our company is making more money, the companies who are selling our product are making more money. It’s just a beneficial thing all around.”
2022 TABLE OF CONTENTS 05 TRANSFORMING 0 6 | THE SUSTAINABLE CITY How Caltech alumni are defining the future of green urban living 12 | MY OWN DEVICES Privacy expert Jeremy Gillula, PhD (BS ’06) on how protecting personal data became a priority 15 PIONEERING 16 | RIPPLE EFFECT How a revolutionary solar-powered water pump is t ransforming the lives of small-plot farmers in India 2 0 | MINING THE SKIES Have Joel Sercel, PhD (MS ’87, PhD ’93) and T ransAstra finally figured out how to unlock the promise of asteroid mining? 24 | THE PRICE OF PIXELS N FT platform founder Matt Lim, BS (BS ’17) on t he future of the form
PAGE 16 Effect)(Ripple©KatieTaylor
“We have an energy problem, a waste problem, a plastic problem, and we need as many people as possible working on solutions.”
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1alumni.caltech.edu 25 ENRICHING 26 | LEVELING UP THE SYLLABUS Richard Bowman, PhD (BS ’02) applies his Caltechhoned problem-solving skills at the intersection of education and technology 3 0 | THE LESSON PLAN FOR AI How advances in edtech can help ensure educational equity 3 4 | SCHEMA 35 | AMERICANS IN PARIS 36 | IN MEMORIAM “If teachers are focusing on technology, they’re not focusing on the kids. The degree to which the technology can do its job and get out of the way is critical.” PAGE 26 City)Sustainable(The©ShellyZhang; Syllabus)theup(Leveling©RichardBowman
Maureen Harmon is a cofounder and managing partner at Dog Ear Creative, a higher education communications firm. Formerly, she worked as the Director of Creative & Editorial Content at Denison University, and the editor of Denison Magazine. Over her 20-year career, she has covered stories about the Pan-American Highway, the longest road in the world; Christianity’s role in politics; addiction and the blessings of recovery; and medical students’ required cadaver dissections.
MAUREEN HARMON
Fascinated early in life by surrealist and dada collage he initially encoun tered on record album covers, his work juxtaposes photography, found elements and drawing. He is interested in abstract photography and its mood of inscrutability. His illustration work has been acknowledged by American Illustration and the Society of Publication Designers.
2 TECHER
ALUMNI.CALTECH.EDU/CHANG-PRIZE
STUART BRADFORD
STEVEN BOYD SAUM
Stuart Bradford is an editorial illustrator whose clients include The Boston Globe, MIT, Stanford University, Cedars-Sinai and The Wall Street Journal
Amanda Friedman is originally from suburban Detroit. She currently lives in Los Angeles and shoots for a variety of different clients including Apple, American Express, The Hollywood Reporter, Entertainment Weekly, Billboard and People. Her photos have been published in the American Photography 15, 17 and 18 annuals. She was a 1999 Surface Magazine Avant Guardian and a 2008 Critical Mass Finalist. To view more of her work, check out www.amandafriedman.com.
The Chang Prize awards up to $65,000 to each recipient to support proposed career exploration projects. Alumni who have received their BS, MS, or PhD from Caltech within the past ten years may submit a proposal.
Steven Boyd Saum is the editor of WorldView Magazine. His writing has appeared in Orion, The Believer, and The Christian Science Monitor, on KQED FM, and elsewhere. He has served as an election observer in Ukraine and elsewhere, and was once a three-time champion on Jeopardy!
PRIZETOCONGRATULATIONSTHE2022CHANGRECIPIENTS
CONTRIBUTORS
AMANDA FRIEDMAN
PAULINE KU, BS (BS ’12) [LEFT] AND ANGELICA ZHOU, BS (BS ’20) CALTECH HAS AWARDED THE 2022 MILTON AND ROSALIND CHANG CAREER EXPLORATION PRIZE to Angelica Zhou and Pauline Ku. Angelica received the Chang Prize for her project focusing on environmental justice, and Pauline received the prize to work on her efforts on mental health advocacy.
The Chang Prize was established by Milton Chang (PhD ’69) — 2002 Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award recipient and Caltech Senior Trustee — and his wife, Rosalind, to provide alumni with the freedom to explore careers outside of academia and build their skills as leaders and advocates.
3alumni.caltech.edu Caltech Alumni Magazine Fall 2022 Publisher: RALPH AMOS, MPA, CALTECH ALUMNI ASSOCIATION Editor: MARK A. DAVIS, BS, CALTECH ALUMNI ASSOCIATION, WITH DOG EAR CONSULTANTS Contributing Writers: BIANCA BLASQUEZ, ZACH KELCH, SRIKAR PORURI Copy Editor: : JEREMY ARNOLD Photography: AMANDA FRIEDMAN, LEAH LEE Illustration: STUART BRADFORD, DAVID VOGIN, TINA ZELLMER Art Director: SUSAN LANDESMANN, LANDESMANN DESIGN CALTECH ALUMNI ASSOCIATION BOARD OF DIRECTORS (2021-22) SATOSHI OHTAKE, PHD (BS ’00): Chair KEITH KARASEK, PHD (BS ’74): Vice Chair, Leadership CHRISTIE CANARIA, PHD (PHD ’08): Vice Chair, Governance JENNIFER LEE, PHD (PHD ’10): Vice Chair, Finance JENNIFER BLANK, PHD (PHD ’93) FREDERIC CALDWELL, BS (BS ’96) ANTHONY CHONG, BS (BS ’10) TARA GOMEZ-HAMPTON, PHD (PHD ’11) JEANNE HARTSHORN, BS (BS ’11) NICK HUTZLER, PHD (BS ’07) MIRAL KIM-E, PHD (BS ’78) DAN LIEBLING, MS (BS ’02) LINDA MAEPA, BS (BS ’96) KEVIN NOERTKER, BS (BS ’09) JASMINE SORIA SEARS, PHD (BS ’12) LIZ STAMESHKIN, JD (BS ’03) ALICE TANG, MS (BS ’79) MARTIN TANGORA, PHD (BS ’57) CALTECH ALUMNI RELATIONS RALPH AMOS, MPA: Assistant Vice President for Alumni Relations; President and CEO, Caltech Alumni Association BIANCA BLASQUEZ, BS: Associate Director, Alumni Digital Integration and Strategy XOCHILTL BRAVO, MSW: Director, Alumni Outreach, Development and Strategic Partnership CHU CHU, MPA: Director, Alumni Operations, Leadership Development and CAA Support; Corporate Secretary MARK A. DAVIS, BS: Director, Alumni Content and Value Delivery ZACH KELCH, BS: Content Support Assistant SRIKAR PORURI, BS: Digital Marketing Coordinator LANCE TAYLOR, BS: Alumni Relations Coordinator BREY WILLIAMS COSTA: Executive Assistant to the Assistant Vice President, Alumni Relations SHERRY WINN, BA: Membership Coordinator MICHELE YAMAMOTO, MA: Assistant Director, Alumni Programs and Engagement CONTACT CAA CALTECH ALUMNI ASSOCIATION MC 12001-97ECALIFORNIA BOULEVARD PASADENA, CA INFO@ALUMNI.CALTECH.EDU91125CONNECTWITHTHECAA AND YOUR FELLOW TECHERS #CaltechAlumni@caltechalumni@caltechalumnifacebook.com/caltechalumni KarinaCOVER:Montilla Edmonds, PhD (MS ’93, PhD ’98) Photograph by Amanda Friedman.... . . ..-
From the Board Chair of the Caltech Alumni Association
Fortunately, Techers share a background and trailblazing spirit that have prepared us to meet these moments. Our collective alma mater has helped instruct 17 Nobel Laureates, and countless others who have helped change and influence the world in their own way, including the three recent recipients of Caltech’s 2022 Distinguished Alumni Award: Sudhir Kumar Jain, PhD (MS ’80, PhD ’83), Bette Korber, PhD (PhD ’88), and Kam-Yin Lau, PhD (BS ’78, MS ’78, PhD ’81).
In 2022, CAA also brought back the Alumni Reunion Celebration, its first in-person, large-scale gathering since 2019, relaunched Techer Alumni Tours designed to inspire participants through group travel opportunities, produced a series of Senior Celebrations for new graduates, and hosted local events in major cities, including Chicago and Seattle, to help existing alumni and new graduates come together and build networks locally. Notably, CAA convened the inaugural Caltech Black Alumni Council this past year to better address the goals and needs of black communities at Caltech, CAA, andAsbeyond.CAAmoves into the future, our programs and approaches will continue to evolve both digitally and in person alongside our members. Together, we are a powerful and committed community with much to offer each other and this world.
It’s no stretch to say that the past two and a half years have brought significant change.
4 TECHER TRANSMISSION
As we enter the second half of 2022 and return to some semblance of pre-pandemic normalcy, an evolving path forward is coming into focus. And while the Caltech Alumni Association (CAA) continues to honor past traditions, we also look to better serve our ever-changing alumni community by providing the tools needed to navigate this brave new world.
As I sign off on my final letter as Chair of the Board, I’d like to thank you all for your support and trust for the past two years. It has been an honor and a privilege to serve.
I look forward to carving out a new role and helping CAA evolve and engage with Caltech’s alumni community as we continue to deliver on our Mission Statement: ensuring the success and wellbeing of every member of the CAA community and advancing humanity in the communities in which we live, work and play.
SATOSHI OHTAKE, P h D (BS ’00) Board CaltechChair,Alumni Association
In addition to supporting Caltech’s academic excellence, CAA serves as a partner and ally to its alumni in their post-graduate lives and professional development. As we continue to welcome new perspectives, including 560 new graduates from the class of 2022, alumni input has revealed a new set of approaches and needs. Recent surveys show a flourishing, diverse and international audience, with more alumni than ever pursuing career paths in business and industry. In turn, CAA has expanded and improved its services and programming. As digital engagement has increased over the past year, exemplified by a 75% increase in virtual seminar attendance, CAA has improved Seminar Days’ remote interface, launched the E-Techer newsletter, hosted a Caltech Black Alumni Council virtual Town Hall covering campus and community topics, and updated its Alumni Portal to help members continue to grow and stay in touch, regardless of location.
SATOSHI OHTAKE, PhD (BS ’00) Board Chair, Caltech Alumni Association
Toeing that line presents a unique set of challenges both for us individually and for CAA as an organization. As Caltech alumni, we are all innovators at heart. But change does not always come naturally.
Our 25,132 members also differ in important and appreciable ways. These diverse voices — and the unique experiences and backgrounds that helped shape them — are essential threads of the fabric that weave together Caltech and CAA.
Caltech’s campus is getting a sustainable upgrade from Yazdani Studios. The Los Angeles-based architecture firm created an innovative design incorporating mass timber for the Resnick Sustainability Resource Center. Currently under construction, Resnick’s new home will sit on the east side of campus and provide an 80,000-square-foot hub for multi-disciplinary research into climate change solutions. The completed center will include visual transparency to the public to put science on display.
TRANSFORMING SCIENCE IN ACTION
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IMAGE: YAZDANI STUDIO
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CitySustainableUnitedNations
6 TECHER [ Transforming ]
Caltech alumni thinkers, inventors, and engineers are helping with that transformation. They are questioning norms about how a city should operate—Do we have to import our water?—and are devising new solutions—Why not make asphalt good for the environment? By reinventing every element of a city, they are helping to lower the planet’s carbon foot print and possibly stave off the worst effects of climate change.
predicts that 70% of the world’s population will live in urban centers in the next 30 years. The city of the future will need to function differently than it does today, and the change over the next three decades will be rapid.
BY MARISA DEMERS • ILLUSTRATION BY TINA ZELLMER
The THE
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T alal Balaa, MS (MS ’89) traveled in his electric vehicle to a place few other plug-in drivers in 2011 would dare to go: Mt. Wilson.To reach the summit, Balaa drove his first-generation Nissan Leaf through switchback curves and high elevations. He arrived at his destination with nearly zero driving range and no charging station in sight. “As an EV driver, I should not have to avoid places because they are out of range,” says Balaa, who returned to his home in South Pasadena thanks to gravity, regenerative brak ing, and some luck. “There has to be a better option.” Most Americans agree. Range anxiety and the limited stock of charging stations are the top reasons U.S. drivers are reluctant to switch to EVs, according to a Volvo study. Addressing these concerns could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, too. According to the EPA, a typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. Balaa set out to devise a solution. He spent the next few years designing a portable, solar-powered EV charger that the average EV owner could use. His invention looks like a traditional car cover but is embedded with small solar Stirling engines that look like spinning bicycle wheels. The energy generated is funneled to a storage device and an inverter converts the power into the type of electricity that EVs need. Even better for Balaa, it meets his need for practicality: it weighs less than 20 pounds, is easy to assemble, and fits into a 9x18 parking space.
Balaa’s prototype is at the threshold of current technology, he says. With support from an angel investor, Balaa plans to manufacture his product after he has figured out how to extract as much power as possible from the solar engines in as little time as possible. It is a challenging problem that, if resolved, could change the future of transportation.
“As an EV driver, I should not have to avoid places because they are out of range...There has to be a better option.”
“No one believed the 4-minute mile could be broken until somebody did it. Then others started breaking the record, too,” Balaa says. “Once someone eliminates some of solar power’s downsides, other people will join in and find even better solutions.” ■
8 TECHER [ Transforming ]
A Remedy for Range Anxiety
T homas Fleming, MS (MS ’84) wants to make every drop of water count. As a senior sustainability analyst for Santa Monica, he is part of an ambitious effort to make the city water self-sufficient by the end of 2023. Like most Southern California communities, this small but densely populated city imports a significant portion of its water from the Colorado River and Northern California watersheds. Yet, as droughts become more severe and long-lasting due to climate change—the western United States is currently in a 22-year megadrought—the water supply is dwindling. Other water districts, notably Costa Mesa’s, have taken note and made strides toward waterSoon,independence.SantaMonica will rely on its groundwater aquifer for more than 90% of its drinking water. The city spent millions on upgrading and building new facilities to improve stormwater harvesting and waste water capture. A portion of that water will be purified and injected back into the aquifer while the remaining amount will be treated and used for non-potable uses such as irrigation and toilet flushing. Water conservation is another critical part of achieving water self-sufficiency because it is a low-cost effort that brings high returns, Fleming says. Since the city implemented a conservation plan in 2015, individual daily water consumption in Santa Monica has dropped Tomorrow’s20%.urban centers will need to have a relentless focus on water conservation and innovation but there is a good reason to believe people are up for the challenge, Fleming says. Despite population growth, Americans use as much water as they did in 1970, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. “Water is the fluid of life,” Fleming says. “It is why we search for it on other planets and marvel about its discovery on the moon. Here on Earth, humans have an innate connection to nature, and there is even a phrase for it— biophilia. We are wired to be good stewards of the environment.” ■ “Water is the fluid of life... It is why we search for it on other planets and marvel about its discovery on the moon...”
Deep Water
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“We have an energy problem, a waste problem, a plastic problem, and we need as many people as possible working on solutions.”
First, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data shows that only 30% of plastic bottles are recycled; the rest are sent to landfills, shipped to other countries, or incinerated. Second, the carbon dioxide-emitting formula used to create asphalt has remained relatively unchanged for the past 100 years. Molten takes plastic bottles, used tires, and used motor oil and turns them into eco-friendly crack sealants and rejuvenator oils, an essen tial ingredient that makes asphalt pliable and easy to lay onto roads. Molten’s first product, the crack sealant, costs less than her competitors’ products and contains 98 plastic bottles per box. Zhang already had years of experience in this sector when she launched Molten. Her father ran an online store that sold asphalt pour pots and other tools to road crews, and she would often help him make cold calls to potential clients. When he died just a few months before her Caltech graduation, Zhang decided to keep his business going. After a few years of attending trade shows, she noticed a trend. “I realized that nothing really changes,” Zhang says. “Businesses make too much money to really think about innovating.”
T here are about 4 million miles of public roads in the United States and if Shelly Zhang’s, PhD (PhD ’16) plan takes off, they will soon be pulling double duty as carbon storage for used plastic.Her company, Molten, remedies two unfortunate realities of the recycling and road industries.
10 TECHER [ Transforming ]
At the same time, Zhang was trying to find her entry into sustainability. When a business investor suggested she address the plastic crisis, Zhang found an uncommon connection. Both plastic and rejuvena tor oil are derived from petrochemicals. In 2019, she began researching new methods to break down the polymers in plastic bottles so they could be added into asphalt. Zhang’s long-term goal, she says, is to repurpose 100% of waste plastic worldwide. Today, Molten has sold 6 million pounds of its crack sealant, its rejuvenator oil is patent pending, and it is preparing to release a second green product. With her success, Zhang hopes others will join her in creating a greener world. “The only thing stopping us from creating more sustainable cities is us,” Zhang says. “We have an energy problem, a waste problem, a plastic problem, and we need as many people as possible working on solutions.” ■
Paving the Way
From Less Bad to Net Zero
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A mericans spend 90% of their days indoors, according to the EPA, and this lifestyle exacts a toll on our planet from the natural resources used to construct homes and buildings to the energy we consume in them.
Jerry Yudelson, MS & MBA (BS ’66), known as the “Godfather of Green,” has been championing sustainable building practices for nearly 30 years. While working as a marketer for a Portland engineering design company in the mid-1990s, Yudelson discovered he had a knack for translating engineering and science concepts in ways that were accessible to general audiences. Yudelson used this skill to become a green building writer, speaker, and consultant. His 12 books and 100 conference presentations balance big ideas and bold sustain ability goals with practical advice and data on cost savings. His publications are the kind that architects, builders, and property owners dog-ear, scribble on, and place on their bookshelves for years. They also help influence change. An early supporter of the Leadership in Energy and Environ mental Design (LEED) rating system—who has trained more than 4,000 people on how to obtain certifica tion—Yudelson published Reinventing Green Buildings: Why Certification Systems Aren’t Working and What We Can Do About It. This book, published in 2016, called for higher LEED standards, a head-turning move at the time. Just two years after the book’s release, LEED issued a new net zero designation. The benchmark of the construction industry, net zero signifies that the amount of energy and water consumed is equal to the amount produced. Building on Yudelson’s emissions.justcarbonacommonitForhighertoadvocatessustainabilitylegacy,continuepushforevenstandards.instance,today,ismuchmoretoexaminestructure’stotalfootprint,notitsenergy-relatedThemining of lime stone for a cement foundation, the manufacturing of steel to frame a house, and the transportation of building materials to the work site all release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. “A lot of stuff we did not even think about when I first started in green building is being talked about now,” Yudelson says. “There is a huge amount of research going on … which is important because the next 10 years will be a critical decade for the planet.” ■ “There is a huge amount of research going on … which is important because the next 10 years will be a critical decade for the planet.”
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12 TECHER [ Transforming ]
By Alexander Gelfand Illustration by Stuart Bradford
Google privacy engineer Jeremy Gillula, PhD (BS ’06) on how protecting personal data became a priority— and what will shape the future of digital freedom
DEVICESOWNMY
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Jeremy Gillula, PhD (BS ’06) was halfway through a PhD in computer science at Stanford when he discovered that his true calling lay in digital privacy. “I realized that what kept me up at night wasn’t, ‘Oh my God, will my robot crash and burn?’” says Gillula, who earned his doctorate for work on robotics and machine learning. “It was, ‘Oh my God, I just read this article about some company that is doing terrible things with respect to users’ privacy.’” That epiphany led to six years at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to defending civil liberties in the digital world. Today, Gillula employs his technical expertise and privacy chops as a staff privacy engineer at Google. “My primary responsibility is to look at products from a privacy angle and say, ‘Is this the right thing in terms of privacy for our users? If not, how can we make it better?’” he says. Here, Gillula talks from his personal perspective as a privacy professional about the latest advances in consumer data management, and what the future of digital privacy might look like.
Unlike those notices that ask you to set your cookie preferences, it seems like these privacy protections would be invisible.
A lot of browsers have already deprecated third-party cookies. That means advertisers are going to have to find a different way to target their ads.
What might that look like?
It’s going from, “I have to watch where this person goes and guess what they’re interested in,” to just asking the browser to do that and saying, “Look, I don’t actually care where they’ve been, I just care what topics they’re interested in so I can send them an ad that they will feel is relevant.”
The goal of modern privacy technology is to become invisible to people who don’t want to think about it, while still giving options to people who do want to directly control their privacy settings. It’s a terrible cognitive load on people when they have to constantly make privacy decisions. It would be much better if we could get them into a good default so they wouldn’t have to worry about it. ■
14 TECHER [ Transforming ]
pressure and government regulation are pushing in the direction of greater control over personal data. Yet at the same time, we’re generating more of that data than ever before, and companies are better able to mine it via machine learning. I wouldn’t necessarily say that those things are strictly at odds. There are techniques now for doing machine learning without actually sending the raw data up to a central server. That’s called federated learning, and it’s a wonderful example of a technique where these things aren’t in tension: You can keep your data locally on your device, you don’t have to share it with some central party, and yet you can still get some benefit from it.
JG: The Chrome browser has a few different proposals to do that by learning locally in your browser—to look at the sorts of sites you visit, and then say, “Okay, based on these types of sites, I think that you’re interested in shoes or gardening or jazz.”
Jeremy Gillula: We are light years ahead of where we were a few years ago. People have started to realize just how important privacy is, and, as a result, companies that serve people have realized how important it is to get privacy right. In particular, they have realized that privacy is a selling point—that people will actually make decisions in terms of what products or services they use based onConsumerprivacy.
JG: You have a bunch of different users on different devices, and you have an algorithm that runs locally on each device. The algorithm basically says, “Okay, based on your local data, here are the changes I would make to some machine-learned model.” Those changes can be combined with everyone else’s changes to update the model, which can then be shipped back out to individual users.
“We are light years ahead of where we were a few years ago. People have started to realize just how important privacy is, and, as a result, companies that serve people have realized how important it is to get privacy right.” Consumers today have access to everything from cookie blockers to incognito browsers. Has digital privacy improved in recent years?
What other privacy-related changes are on the horizon?
G-board, the Android keyboard, uses federated learning. We definitely don’t want to collect the stuff that people are typing on their phones. But we can learn locally on your device and send up only the changes to the model that describe how people use language so that we can better predict the next word they are likely to type. That way we don’t have to look at the raw data of what you are typing, but we can still create a good model that will be beneficial for everybody.
How does that work?
JG: The days of the third-party cookie are numbered. A thirdparty cookie is essentially a pseudonymous ID made up of random numbers that are assigned to a browser. It’s collected on any website that has embedded content from the third party that created it, which is usually an advertiser. That advertiser can then tell if a user has visited any of those websites.
THE HOLE PICTURE
IMAGE:
PIONEERING
The first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*, pronounced “sadge-ay-star”), was generated by a multiinstitution collaboration that includes a Caltech-led imaging team. The international research team, called the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, consists of more than 300 researchers from 80 institutions around the world.
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Caltech’s Katherine Bouman, PhD, headed up the imag ing team, with support from former Caltech postdoctoral researcher He Sun, PhD, and current Caltech postdoctoral researchers Aviad Levis, PhD, and Junhan Kim, PhD. EHT COLLABORATION
16 TECHER RIPPLEEFFECT [ Pioneering ]
BY DAN MORRELL
17alumni.caltech.edu How a revolutionary solarpowered water pump is transforming the lives of small-plot farmers in India
For farmers in the tribal belts of Jharkhand, in eastern India, the growing season is monsoon season, lasting from June to September. From February to June, though, the heat and lack of rain makes growing impossible, sending many farmers out of the region to find better places to grow or other ways to make money.
[ Pioneering ]
One of the local farmers who got a pump was also the local school principal, and instead of migrating, he stayed home in his village, keeping school open for an extra couple of months.
In 2015, Katie Taylor, MS (BS ’13) and her cofounder at engineer ing startup Khethworks deployed five solar-powered water pumps they had designed to the Jharkhand region, allowing farmers there to water their crops by accessing available groundwater—without having to spend money to fuel diesel-powered pumps. To Taylor, the experience was a powerful proof of concept not just of Khethworks’ technology, but of the wider implications: One of the local farmers who got a pump was also the local school principal, and instead of migrating, he stayed home in his village, keeping school open for an extra couple of months. “I really saw the ripple effect of the impact across the fabric of these villages,” says Taylor.
Left: The portability of Khethworks’ product enables farmers to easily secure it overnight. Setup takes only a few minutes, allowing it to be used in different locations around a village.
“You need to stop talking about this and either do something or just keep it to yourself,” they told her. She hatched a plan: Always good at numbers and building things, her path to impact would be through engineering. “We figured it’d be a good tool to effect change, partic ularly in the developing world for people who needed it the most.”
For Taylor, this first success was the culmination of a vision that dated back to her first summer home as an undergrad at Pomona College, where she was studying subjects like environmental science, sexual politics in the Middle East, and sculpture. “It was super hippy-dippy, which I loved,” says Taylor. She was hanging out with her two older brothers late one night, lecturing them about the problems of the world. After a while, they halted the monologue.
She was aware of the challenge ahead. After enrolling in a joint engineering program between Pomona and Caltech, she went to the student center on her first day at Caltech and asked for tutors in all five of her courses. “They said, ‘This is not how it works—usually students come to us after a couple weeks when you’re struggling,’”
18 TECHER
Above Left: Taylor connecting a water pipe as part of a product demonstration in the village in Jharkhand, India, where farmers irrigated their first-ever summer season crop using the Khethworks solar pump.
Pg 17: Khethworks’ community-based strategy includes discussing ownership models with local women’s groups (top left), pump demonstrations (top right), product troubleshooting (bottom left), and, finally, irrigation (bottom right). .-- .. -.
“The beauty is that, when it works, the farmers are making more money, our company is making more money, the companies who are selling our product are making more money. It’s just a beneficial thing all around.”
As impressive as the numbers are, it’s the anecdotes from the users that keep the company motivated. Taylor recounts the story of three women who pooled their money to buy a pump to help extend the growing season on their plot of land. “The previous year, they had made the equivalent of about $100,” she says. “And then, using the pump for one summer, they ended up making $780.” That money goes into buying more nutritious food, buying more land, investing in children’s education, and female economic and social empowerment in the village, says Taylor. “It’s the kind of thing that is simply transformative.” ■
19alumni.caltech.edu she says with a laugh. She relied on those tutors, was a frequent visitor at her professors’ office hours, and “worked long, long hours.” With her focus still squarely on impact, she pressed on—through her graduation at Caltech and onto MIT to continue her engineering studies. There she met her Khethworks cofounders, Kevin Simon and Victor Lesniewski, and the three focused on solving the irriga tion problem that many east Indian farmers were facing. During visits to the region, Taylor found that while there was plenty of available groundwater, there was no easy or affordable way to access it. So she asked the farmers about what kind of product would work for them. They told her they needed a durable, portable, easy-touse pump, something that wouldn’t require the women—often left behind in the village as the men migrated for work—to have to hire laborers to start up, as they often had to do with diesel pumps. This on-the-ground product research proved invaluable. “User-centered design is key to the success of the product,” says Taylor. “It’s key to serving people the way they want to be served, which is really important to us because that’s what we were there to do—to serve theseThefarmers.”development process took years and countless revisions, but eventually Khethworks developed a highly efficient, solarpowered submersible pump system that weighs under ten pounds. It was a massive breakthrough with enormous commercial potential, but cashing in quickly was never Taylor’s goal. “Some investors, of course, wanted us to move faster,” says Taylor. “But we were deliberately cautious about [determining] when we felt that we were finally ready to enter the market. The beauty is that, when it works, the farmers are making more money, our company is making more money, the companies who are selling our product are making more money. It’s just a beneficial thing all around. But we can’t do it wrong. It would’ve been unethical, and the company would’ve failed, too.” Today, Khethworks has sold about 675 pumps, and Taylor says the pumps are usually shared by four farmers. “So we’re looking at close to 3,000 people, and of course, those people have families, so the impact has been massive,” says Taylor, who left her CEO position at Khethworks in December 2021 for a board role guiding strategy.
Pg 16: Female farmers in Bihar, India, work in the field (top); A community meeting for Kheth works’ first-ever pilot in Jharkhand, India.
TaylorKatieofcourtesyPhotography
20 TECHER Pioneering ]
MINING SKIESTHE
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UNTIL A FEW YEARS AGO, the total number of satellites in orbit was just a few thousand. In the next decade, experts expect 100,000 satellites to be launched— the vast majority into low earth orbits. That sounds great, but today’s rockets are not well suited to getting these satellites into their proper orbits in space. Some need to be in higher orbits to extend their lives or view larger areas of the globe, while others need to be placed in orbits spaced around the Earth in ways that rockets are simply not good at doing. Joel Sercel, PhD (MS ’87, PhD ’93), who founded Trans Astronautica Corporation (TransAstra) in 2015 and serves as CEO, gets the problem. “It’s like you’re on a business trip, and the airplane drops you at the airport,” he says. “There’s no Uber to get you to your hotel. Today, spacecraft have to carry their own propulsion systems to get there. That would be like if you had to carry a bicycle on the airplane with you, and then pedal off to your Holiday Inn. That’s ridiculous.” His solution? A hotel shuttle. “We’re putting in place a transportation system.” TransAstra is developing the Worker Bee series of craft— small, medium, and large—part of a suite they call Apis. (That’s the genus of honey bees; it also stands for Asteroid Provide In-Situ Supplies.) They’ll serve as space tugs, pickups, or big rigs hauling cargo from a container ship— pick your metaphor. All are powered by a solar thermal engine called the Omnivore, which TransAstra has been testing at a facility in Colorado since last year. In June, they completed a new facility in Southern California known as the Hive, equipped with a pair of large vacuum systems with solar simulators. Sercel has a deep background in space technology, with 14 years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and another 14 Have Joel Sercel, PhD (MS ’87, PhD ’93) and TransAstra finally figured out how to unlock the promise of asteroid mining?
LeeLeahbyPhotographySaumBoydStevenBy•
22 TECHER [ Pioneering ] years teaching and conducting research at Caltech. With TransAstra, his team is developing technology not only to address the space logistics market—a multibillion dollar opportunity—but also to prepare for a future built around harvesting the resources of asteroids.
To locate NEOs, TransAstra has developed what it calls the Sutter telescope system, designed to be low cost and high performance, and bringing together advanced software and electronics—including large numbers of fast-imaging optical systems. That enables what TransAstra calls “optimized matched filter tracking (OMFT)” to find thousands more small asteroids per year and determine their brightness and velocity in real time.
Hayden Burgoyne, PhD (MS ’12, PhD ’16) is the head of mission formulation at TransAstra. He recently came over from JPL, drawn by his long-held interest in asteroid mining. His interest is in both the virtue of the endeavor—resource extraction away from the planet we’re trying to steward—and the fascinating technical problems it poses. At TransAstra, he has been assisting Sercel with a lunch-and-learn series for colleagues that replicates the upper division and graduate level course Sercel taught. “It’s kind of the fundamentals of spacecraft design,” Burgoyne says, “Even as CEO, Joel is taking a professorial approach.”
And because water is now known to be widely abundant in our solar system, TransAstra’s technology turns the vast majority of asteroids into potential refueling stations. Here’s how the mining works: a craft will encapsulate an asteroid in an inflatable bag, then use solar concentrators to generate heat for “Optical Mining”—breaking up the asteroid and collecting its valuable minerals while simultaneously driving water out of the excavated material and into another enclosing inflatable bag. First to be tested will be Mini Bee, which NASA is paying TransAstra to prototype. Full-scale, operational asteroid mining will begin with Honey Bee, one of its space tugs outfitted with mining equipment, which is about the same mass as a big pickup truck. Carried into orbit aboard, say, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, it will use water propellant to travel to an asteroid about the size of a house and extract from it some 100 tons of water—enough to fill a small backyard swimming pool. Given the cost of sending water into orbit, “that 100 tons of water is worth about $1 billion in space,” Sercel says. The ultimate asteroid mission vehicle is the Queen Bee, capable of harvesting an asteroid perhaps half the size of a football field and extracting a few thousand tons of water. When the Apis craft are able to harvest water to make rocket propellant, that in turn will bring down the cost of getting around in space. “It will actually make sense to harvest precious metal from those objects,” Sercel says. “The trick to asteroid mining is to go after the relatively small asteroids, of which there are literally billions in the solar system.” Just among the near earth asteroids—which are those that pass close to the earth’s orbit around the sun—there are about 1 billion that are one meter in diameter or larger. “We only know where about 30,000 of them are, which is why we’ve developed telescope technologies to find those little ones.”
Another dimension to the culture: “Joel always makes it seem like a surprise that some innovation has happened,” Burgoyne says. “Yet it’s happened so often, it can’t be an accident.”
Burgoyne credits the flexibility and freedom team members have to come up with ideas. “But Joel also pushes us to move as quickly as we can. It’s the right crucible for generating new ideas.” That may be why TransAstra already has five patents issued and another 20 or so patent applications in the pipeline. Those ideas have also turned heads, drawing investment from “The trick to asteroid mining is to go after the relatively small asteroids, of which there are literally billions in the solar system,” says Sercel.
Both of these plans will be powered by the Omnivore, which is slated for space testing by the end of 2023. The engine earns its name because it is designed to be fueled by any volatile fluids—especially water—boiled by heat gener ated by lightweight solar-powered concentrators. Squeeze that gas out the back and you’ve got propulsion—similar to chemical rocket engines, only without the carcinogenic contents or the equivalent risk of explosion.
23alumni.caltech.edu startup accelerator YCombinator and from private partners ready to put the Worker Bees to work. Constellations of satellites are needed to establish the internet in space—and serve increased GPS demand as more self-driving cars hit the streets back on earth, notes Nicole Shumaker, vice president of partnerships for TransAstra. Worker Bees can haul those satellites to where they want to be—into a higher geostationary orbit or even a lunar orbit. That allows for simpler satellite design and extends their mission life. “They don’t burn all their propellant trying to get into their final orbit,” Shumaker says.
“From an early age, we feel like denizens of the universe.” Earth is the starting point. But only the starting point. And mining asteroids is one more stop on the road. ■
“Joel always makes it seem like a surprise that some innovation has happened,” Burgoyne says. “Yet it’s happened so often, it can’t be an accident.” .----
The Sutter telescope system has also elicited keen interest from the U.S. Space Force. Deployed in cislunar space—between the moon and the earth—the system could play a key role in broader space domain awareness, including, Shumaker says, “traffic management, debris detection, and finding other celestial bodies that might pass through unexpectedly.” That includes objects like the meteor that hit Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013, as well as human-engineered objects launched by nations with less-than-friendly intent. And yet, like the rest of TransAstra’s projects, the system’s ultimate goal is pressing the boundaries of discovery and changing the relationship between humans and space.
To understand why Sercel is going where he is, it helps to understand where he comes from. He grew up in the Arizona desert, the son of an Air Force fighter pilot, watching his father blast into the wild blue yonder. He talks about the overview effect experienced by astronauts—that shift in awareness that comes from seeing Earth from space—as something he experienced early in life, gazing up into the clear night sky.
The Price of Pixels
ML: The main difference between us and big NFT marketplaces like OpenSea or Magic Eden is that we’re really focused on helping independent artists and creators make a living with NFTs. And beyond the marketplace, we want to build a support system for artists with things like community management, analytics, and even fundraising for longer-term projects. That last idea is something we’re really excited about. A lot of artists want to create something bigger, like a short film or a comic book, and we think NFTs are a really good fundraising vehicle to make those kinds of creative projects happen.
“...there
People also don’t understand that there are a lot more applications and opportunities in the space besides just selling really expensive art and collectibles. There are many inherent advantages to the technology around ownership and identity, and as we move more towards a digital world, more and more use cases will pop up.
Matt Lim: A lot of people still don’t understand the value of it— and part of this misunderstanding has to do with the underlying technology. To understand NFTs, it’s helpful to understand block chain technology—but simply put, NFTs are the best way to represent digital assets. Digital assets were a thing before NFTs, but compared to their web2 counterparts, NFTs are far easier to buy, sell, and display.
24 TECHER [ Pioneering ]
NFT platform founder Matt Lim, BS (BS ’17) on the future of the form
How have NFTs challenged our traditional measures or definitions of art?
ML: Usually when people think of buying art, they’re thinking of buying a painting or a print—and for artists, that’s not always the easiest thing. It’s hard to ship a painting and in order to make prints, you have to connect to some third-party service that will produce and ship it. NFTs allow artists to produce their work and not need to go through the process of making something physical or printing it or shipping it. They sell their art for the art’s sake. And I think that’s super cool. ■
How does Formfunction differ from existing NFT platforms?
To Matt Lim, BS (BS ’17) the non-fungible token (NFT) movement feels like the perfect culmination of his varied interests. At Caltech, he designed and printed shirts, made music, and even won the student poetry contest in 2016. All the while, he was getting deeper into computer science, creating, for instance, a website where you could play a digital version of the Omnichord, a favorite electronic instrument. These two paths aligned when a friend first turned him onto NFTs in early 2021. He was quickly hooked, launching an NFT platform as part of a hackathon later that year. In December 2021, Lim launched his second NFT platform, Formfunction, which focuses on growing and supporting independent NFT artists. In this Q&A, Lim explains why he’s focused on helping digital artists thrive—and why he believes in the future of the form. are a lot more applications and opportunities in the space besides just selling really expensive art and collectibles.”
What do you think the world still misunderstands about NFTs?
By Dan Morrell
IMAGE: OF L
ENRICHING
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GREAT AND SMALL
EAP, CALTECH, AND MERKIN INSTITUTE
A new type of vaccine provides protection against a variety of SARS-like betacoronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2 variants, in mice and monkeys, according to a study led by researchers in the laboratory of Caltech’s Pamela Bjorkman, PhD, the David Baltimore Professor of Biology and Bioengineering. The vaccine, known as a mosaic nanoparticle, presents the immune system with pieces of the spike proteins from SARS-CoV-2 and seven other SARS-like betacoronaviruses, attached to a protein nanoparticle structure, to induce the production of a broad spectrum of cross-reactive antibodies.
25alumni.caltech.edu
WELLCOME
COURTESY
LEVELING UP THE SYLLABUS
BY WAYNE LEWIS • ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID VOGIN
RICHARD BOWMAN, PHD (BS ’02) APPLIES HIS ANDTHEPROBLEM-SOLVINGCALTECH-HONEDSKILLSATINTERSECTIONOFEDUCATIONTECHNOLOGY
26 TECHER [ Enriching ]
Y HIS OWN ACCOUNT, the story of RICHARD BOWMAN, PHD (BS ’02) is a testament to how one teacher can change the course of a life. In his case, it was an eighth-grade science teacher who saw potential in Bowman that he didn’t know he had.
“My teacher told me to go to Caltech,” he says, “and that I was going to either discover cold fusion or a cure for cancer. So a very low bar, right?”
27alumni.caltech.edu
“To be a good teacher, you systematically, regularly, and some what effortlessly connect with somewhere between 10 to 300 young people a year; demonstrate that you care about them; and convince
Bowman’s strategies are guided by experiences from his own schooling and his time as a teacher.
In this endeavor, Bowman cites the influence of his days at the“TheInstitute.mostaccurate way to describe my approach is that I’m an engineer and a problem solver,” he says. “That’s what I got from Caltech. It was a heavy dose of difficult problems that all needed to be solved, and learning how to find the next answer—and how not to give up.”
“When it came down to who actually made a difference in the trajectory of my life, it was an excellent adult who told me I could do something and backed me up so I could do it,” says Bowman, who earned a doctorate from Pardee RAND Graduate School and pursued postdoctoral research at Harvard. “I believe in public education. It helped me, and I’d like to help others.”
28 TECHER [ Enriching ]
BOWMAN FOLLOWED THE ADVICE of his teacher—who covered the application fee— and headed to Caltech to study engineering and applied science. He has channeled that expertise back into education, first as a schoolteacher in his native Los Angeles and today as chief information and strategy officer for Albuquerque Public Schools (APS) in New Mexico. For Bowman, working as a leader at the nexus of education and technology is a tribute to—and a means to magnify—the impact of that science teacher and the other educators who had a deep and lasting influence on him.
BY THE NUMBERS
That mission takes many forms. As the steward of the APS’s data and information systems, Bowman helms the effort to turn raw numbers into insights that drive improvements. At the same time, he oversees the initiative to ensure that every pupil has a device for pandemic-forced remote instruction. He’s also expanded oppor tunities for students by sponsoring the district’s e-sports program. His impact has earned him accolades, including recognition by Albuquerque Business First in 2020 as one of the publication’s “40 Under Forty” in New Mexico. Bowman’s vision and analytical skills spur APS’s efforts to harness the power of increasingly abundant data. Job one was to make that data publicly available, so Bowman established a dash board on the district’s website with rich metrics of school enrollment and demographics. “Accountability starts with transparency,” he says. “Data is critical. Even if people don’t know exactly what it means, it’s typically the one thing that they can agree upon.”
Bowman aims to keep applications of that data sharply focused on the needs of the district’s pupils. He has employed student data, for example, to identify those who may be on the verge of trouble and could benefit from intervention by the counseling department, and helped put test scores into a context that can guide curricula and teacher training. “You find the people who can do something different to make positive changes in the lives of kids,” he says, “and you find out what information they need to better make that decision or take that action.”
ALL ABOUT CONNECTION
“I said, ‘It would be a shame for it to just die because we don’t understand it,’” he recalls. Securing grant funding to cover fees for all high schools was crucial. “If you don’t take affirmative steps toward having some level of equity, the only folks who are going to be able to access it are the ones who always have,” Bowman says. “It doesn’t make a very robust program when there are haves and have-nots.”
them that in some part they should live their lives based on what they learned in your classroom,” he says. “That takes a lot of emotional fortitude. Technology is a way to support and sponsor that type of connection, and make it easier.”
Resourcefulness, dealmaking, and coordination were necessary to enable home connectivity after COVID-19 contagion suddenly drove instruction online. In addition to APS-provided hotspots, families could get access to federal funding and low-cost basic broadband from a local provider. “It was basically ‘all of the above’ to try to solve the problem,” Bowman says. He tips his hat to the stripped-down Chromebook as cornerstone hardware for facilitating connection between teachers and students. Ease of use and setup kept his IT team from being overwhelmed and allowed teachers to spend less time providing tech support.
“If teachers are focusing on technology, they’re not focusing on the kids,” Bowman says. “The degree to which the technology can do its job and get out of the way is critical.”
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READY PLAYER ONE
As executive sponsor and cheerleader for the program, he has watched as e-sports grew and thrived in the district, one of the bright spots through the pandemic. APS’s Del Norte High School even won a state championship over better-resourced schools in 2022. The team excelled across five video games comprising racing (Super Mario Kart 8), combat (Super Smash Bros. Ultimate), and contests based on traditional sports (Madden NFL 2022).
The impact on players is what truly excites Bowman. “For some of the kids, it is a lifeline,” he says. “It’s an opportunity for leader ship, to be recognized for their skills, and to fit in. And it frankly wouldn’t exist otherwise.”
A movement emerged in 2018 to institute e-sports—in other words, team video game competitions—in New Mexico high schools. Fitting with his tech-forward role at APS, Bowman rallied volunteers on his team to push for it at the district, despite some internal resistance from traditionalists.
He’s particularly thrilled that a graduating senior recently received an e-sports scholarship to attend the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, the third such award so far.
“That’s what’s cool about education,” he says. “You put in all the work, and then all of a sudden you somehow have an amazing young adult who is going to do awesome things.” ■
“If teachers are focusing on technology, they’re not focusing on the kids,” Bowman says. “The degree to which the technology can do its job and get out of the way is critical.”
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30 TECHER [ Enriching ]
KARINA MONTILLA EDMONDS, PHD (MS ’93, PHD ’98) says the skills necessary to succeed in the modern workforce are changing just as rapidly as technology. Part of her job as Global Head of Academies and University Alliances at software giant SAP is to explore new ways to use tech to support students and prepare them for the world that awaits. She has partnered with businesses and universities to standardize some national curricula, better develop and diversify future talent, and explore new educational models, including gaming. Edmonds spoke to Techer about where edtech has fallen short and what the pandemic taught us about how to improve the educational outcomes of everyone—no matter their background.
INTERVIEWBYMAUREENHARMONPHOTOGRAPHYBYAMANDAFRIEDMAN
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THE LESSON PLAN
HOW ADVANCES IN EDTECH CAN HELP ENSURE EDUCATIONAL EQUITY
{FOR AI}
Before the pandemic, there was optimism that AI-powered edtech could help find and address learning disparities that disproportionately affect lower-income students—but the remote-learning pivot was a stark reminder of the limits imposed by the digital divide.
To apply AI—at a minimum—we need people to have access to a computer. Without that, we’re missing a large portion of society in the data that influences algorithms.
In addition, parents who had jobs that they could continue from home were better able to support their kids in this online environ ment. Others who had to continue to be physically present at their jobs weren’t able to do the same. Those people with resources could augment and supplement what they needed, where people who weren’t able to come up to speed—whether it was with resources or WiFi—continued to be hurt and fall behind. In addition, students who are hungry or face obstacles at home don’t learn as well as students with better food and health access. It opened our eyes to additional gaps beyond digital.
ASK ME, ‘WHAT SHOULD I BE LEARNING?’ I TELL THEM: ‘LEARN HOW TO LEARN.’ BECAUSE WHATEVER YOU LEARN TODAY WILL CHANGE.”
KME: Internet access is definitely a challenge—and when we are only delivering instruction virtually, that becomes the biggest barrier.
But one of the biggest issues is that the digital divide is just a symptom of the economic divide.
“WHEN STUDENTS
Most of us know the term “digital divide” to describe the gap between those who have access to digital resources, information, and learning, and those who don’t. But explain what the term means to you personally and how you carry that through your work.
KME: I was really excited to see how AI could be applied to improve engagement and create excitement for learning. I loved the fact that you could teach the same lesson with a different story to better engage the student and adapt to their learning style. Do they like sports? Data? Lessons could be built around their interests. And it offers the opportunity for more interactive learning and assessment—which frees teachers up to work more closely with students who may need additional help.
What’s the biggest challenge in advancing edtech?
Karina Montilla Edmonds: This was certainly a term that we knew before the pandemic—but it became amplified through COVID. To me, this divide is the growing gap between the underprivileged members of our society—often poor, rural, the elderly, those with physical disabilities—who have limited access to computers and the internet versus the wealthier middle class who are living in typically urban and suburban areas and have access everywhere. But it’s not just the availability of the internet and computers, it’s also the availability of things that are made possible because of those resources. When I need to buy something, I go online before I walk into a store and I find the best price. Some people are at a disadvantage in everyday transactions, like access to the best price. That is all part of the digital divide. Prior to the pandemic, there was a lot of hope that AI could bridge the divide in education. What prompted such expectations?
32 TECHER [ Enriching ]
When the pandemic hit, we turned quickly to online learning, but COVID revealed that we’re further behind in being able to implement AI and other technologies to help students. How far off are we? KME: I’ve always known how far we were from serving all students, because I am keenly aware of resource issues in marginalized communities. Even so, I was still hopeful. But the pandemic was a wake-up call to our education system. Even places with ample resources had a difficult pivot from a fully in-person environment to a fully virtual environment. And who was hit the worst? Underserved communities that had limited or nonexistent access to digital resources like WiFi and computers.
Obviously, teachers themselves were not prepared to go to this virtual environment—and I think part of the reason most teachers become teachers is for that interaction. So we need to help train teachers to use technology to enhance, not replace, those in-person interactions.
For example, many school districts did not require students to turn on their cameras during remote learning, and rightly so, because everybody was in a different situation. But that lack of face-to-face time made it difficult to assess student engagement.
I tell them: “Learn how to learn.” Because whatever you learn today will change.
KME: I’ve spent my career at the intersection of academia and industry, and it’s a synergistic relationship. Companies need skilled labor, and schools and universities are in the business of educating the workforce. One of the things companies are recognizing is that we need to support younger and younger students. We can no longer wait until they’re graduating from college or even high school.
We’re also leveraging gamification in partnership with UC Berkeley. There’s a lot of data to show that employees and students are more engaged when they play a game to learn. Through gaming, we can incentivize students by winning points or challenges. Games have been shown to motivate, excite, and drive optimal learning out comes. On the college level, we work with the business school HEC Montreal, which developed a business simulation game in which participants manage their virtual company in a competitive market. This allows students to learn business intelligence and gain analytics skills through simulated manufacturing scenarios.
What do you think the future of education looks like 10, 20 years from now?
33alumni.caltech.edu Can you talk a bit about the importance of the technologies you’re leveraging in partnership with universities and industries to address the digital divide?
I don’t think physical spaces will go away. There’s still no replacement for in-person, human-to-human interaction. I think what is going to change is the way those spaces look. Hopefully we’ll no longer have a classroom with a teacher at the front lecturing students. It will really be about coming together in a creative space where everybody is part of the learning environment—where students, with their diverse backgrounds, also become teachers.
At SAP, we’ve partnered with Generation Unlimited through the National Science Foundation to standardize some national curricula and create workforce readiness programs that really inform and connect the private sector with future talent. The problem we’re trying to solve is how to create a skilled workforce when skills are changing at a dizzying pace. These programs teach students—with or without digital resources—how to develop critical thinking skills, logical thought processes and decision making, and how to employ creative problem-solving. For example, we can teach students how to code without computer access. When students ask me, “What should I be learning?”
There are still so many educational resources in tech, and so much untapped potential. We now have opportunities across the globe, limited only by our time zones. ■
KME: To support students globally—students with different access points—education will become more immersive, more experimental. It will become multimodal and collaborative. We will continue to explore opportunities in artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, and gamification—and work to address bias along the way by developing a better pipeline of future talent.
Yet, when you see or meet another Techer out in the world, it is always a welcome surprise, right? Unprompted, you launch into a familiar line of questions: “When did you graduate? What house were you? Whose lab? When was the last time you were on campus? Do you know…?” It’s an excellent start to a new friendship or an interesting expansion of your professional network.
Caltech’s list of “Who’s Who and Who’s Where” is almost endless. It also is a network you can leverage across generations as you navigate all facets of your life from personal to professional.
A s we continue to improve access and expand this network, we have a humble request: Can you commit to helping build the most robust alumni network in the world? If the answer is yes, there are three simple things you can do:
3. Watch for a Caltech Alumni Census. Complete it, return it, and help us discover better ways to expand your Techer network. CAA w ill share the big data with the broader alumni community.
I f you’re like most alumni, you likely don’t know how many Techers live near you—whether that be in the U.S., Germany, Nigeria or Japan. Unless you see a sweatshirt, baseball cap or car with a Caltech vanity plate, it can be difficult to spot a fellow Techer.
A nd the connections run deeper than geography. Techers abound across more industries than ever, including healthcare, energy, manufacturing, the law, and agriculture. How many alumni are professors, work in labs or help lead companies like Google or Microsoft? How many are at Boeing or Airbus?
2. Join Techers at virtual and live programs (COVID-permitting). CAA might be coming to a city near you soon.
34 TECHER SCHEMA
Recently, I spoke with a Techer from Houston who didn’t think many Techers lived in his city. I was able to tell him that more than 300 Caltech alumni live in Houston. (Data put it at 333.) “You must be kidding me,” he remarked. “That many?” “Yes, that many,” I responded. “And we’re going to help you find them.” That goes for you, too, no matter where you live and work— Houston, Boston, Dallas, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Frankfurt, Nairobi, Dakar or Paris.
From the Executive Director of the Caltech Alumni Association Oh, the places Techers go! While some stay on campus to help shape future generations of Techers, others head off to blaze new trails and effect change in places ranging from Iceland and Australia to Antarctica and theLthermosphere.astspring,Caltech graduated its newest class of alumni— sending 560 new Techers (218 undergraduates and 342 graduates) out into the world. The global alumni network now boasts more than 25,000 Techers working to advance humanity in and beyond their respective communities.
We have thought quite a bit about how to build stronger alumni connections. No matter where you live, work, or play, that sense of community and belonging is paramount in enhancing both your well-being and your ability to help others. Fortunately, access to your Caltech community might be closer than you know.
One last favor: start sporting Caltech gear when you’re out-andabout. I suspect you’ll be pleasantly surprised at whom you’ll meet!
RALPH E. AMOS Executive Director, Caltech Alumni Association
1. Register in the Caltech Alumni Portal using your LinkedIn profile t o authenticate.
RALPH E. AMOS Executive Director, Caltech Alumni Association
JLR: When immigrants like Josephine Baker arrived in Paris after World War I, or right after World War II like Richard Wright, they found a very rich artistic and intellectual scene that neither conflict really changed. They also encoun tered a society that had been devastated by war and was thus, in a relative sense, poor. Parisians and tourists alike were quite avid to enjoy the performances of entertainers like Baker or jazz artists. Writers like Wright would have found it comparatively cheap to live in Paris compared to New York or Chicago. Less exalted immigrants of color surely encountered discrimination and racism.
JLR: Yes, I am a jazz fan! It’s about half of the music on my phone. I vividly remember going to a Miles Davis concert in the Roman arena in Arles.
JLR: Achieving a Caltech degree is incredible preparation for life. You can use the training to solve problems, to explore anything with confidence. The world is more complicated and people with technical and analytical skill are in ever greater demand. Any thoughts you’d like to add and share with alumni?
35alumni.caltech.edu
Paris has a storied jazz scene. Are you a jazz fan?
Do you have any tips for Techers visiting Paris?
Travel is more than a destination. And despite the cliché, it’s more than the journey. The right travel companions can make a good trip into a great experience. On Techer Alumni Tours, Caltech community members explore and learn together, making trips more memorable and rewarding. In April 2023, passengers on the trip to Paris, spotlighting the African American expatriate experience, will see the city with Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, PhD (PhD ’88), the Rea A. and Lela G. Axline Professor of Business Economics at Caltech. Techer talked to Rosenthal about his excitement to share his unique perspectives as a native of both the US and France, and as a scholar of European economic history. .
If you’d like to join Rosenthal on the trip to Paris, or sign up for another Techer Alumni Tour, visit www.alumni.caltech.edu/travel.
What excites you about sharing Paris with Caltech Jean-Laurentalumni?Rosenthal: Having been born in the US but raised in France and now working in the US, I am an “immigrant” and a “native” in both countries. This has given me a nuanced perspective about a variety of issues, like notions of race and nationalism. I hope to share the joy I feel from just listening to how my two societies evolve without seeking to judge one better than the other. What might it have been like for new immigrants to France 100 years ago as they built new lives?
JLR: This trip will be as much a discovery for me as for everyone else. I hope we can have great fun in the collision between the history of black artists and history of the Parisian economy. ■
As a 1988 graduate, what advice would you give to new Caltech alumni?
The Techer trip to Paris will highlight the influence of African-American expatriates on Parisian life, as well as visits to hear jazz, cruise the Seine, visit the Musée du quai Branly, and much more. .--. .-. .. --.. . ... ·-·-·-
Americans in Paris
JLR: Walk the city and read the history in build ings. Have lunch at a neighborhood café. Visit the Sainte Chapelle late in the day or go to a concert there (the late light is best for the stained glass).
We mourn the loss of the following members of our Caltech alumni community
36 TECHER 1938 Kamal Djanab (PhD ’38) 1942 William Kennedy (BS ’42) 1945 Richard Dean (BS ’45) Robert Leo (BS ’45) Donald Sweet (BS ’45) 1946 Donald Hicks (BS ’46) 1947 Dale Meier (BS ’47, MS ’48) Jerard Werner (BS ’47) 1948 Welko Gasich (ENG ’48) 1949 Roy Gould (BS ’49, PhD ’56) Dan King (BS ’49) 1950 Fred Adler (MS ’48, PhD ’50) Donald Bartz (MS ’50) 1951 Edwin Matzner (BS ’51) Eugene Parker (PhD ’51) 1980 Distinguished Alumni Award 1952 Wilbur Barmore (BS ’52) Carl Larson (BS ’52) 2016 Distinguished Alumni Award 1954 Samuel Autrey (BS ’54) Will Richards (BS ’54) 1955 James Adams (BS ’55) Keith Henrie (MS ’55) Leon Silver (PhD ’55) 1956 Keith Booman (PhD ’56) David Pettit (MS ’56) 1958 Albert Claus (PhD ’58) 1959 C. Richard Johnson (BS ’59, MS ’60) Thomas Morton (BS ’59) Guy Thompson Jr. (PhD ’59) 1960 Charles Antoniak (BS ’60) 1963 Frank Rees (BS ’63) Eliot Tucker (MS ’63) 1965 Melinda Groom (MS ’65) Jack Jokipii (PhD ’65) 1966 Donald Cronin (MS ’61, PhD ’66) Arthur Riggs (PhD ’66) 2008 Distinguished Alumni Award Richard Silver (BS ’66, PhD ’71) 1967 Alan Dubin (PhD ’67) Terrill Hendrickson (BS ’67) 1968 David Evans (PhD ’68) 2008 Distinguished Alumni Award 1969 Jeff Grove Jr. (BS ’69) 1972 Paul Morand (BS ’72) 1975 William Sharman (BS ’75) 1976 William Freeman (MS ’76) 1979 Gilbert Johnson (PhD ’79) 1996 Deborah Shnek (MS ’91, PhD ’96)
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Donated to the Caltech Archives and Special Collections by famed Physics Professor Earnest Watson, this astrolabe is a modern, sophisticated example of an ancient tool. Dated around 1880, it includes intricate floral design, Arabic calligraphy detailing the functions of each layer, and visible cosmological points. It was designed to help its user find specific celestial bodies, calculate latitude, keep time, and find the direction of the Kaaba in order to pray. From classical times, the astrolabe comprised a disk with the edge marked in degrees and a pivoted pointer. The earliest astrolabes, made by ancient Greeks, were used to take basic astronomical measurements, typically of the altitudes of celestial bodies. Later, medieval Arab and Persian astronomers innovated the tool by adding more functionality and artistic craftsmanship. In one text, the medieval Persian astronomer al-Sufi describes over 1,000 uses for an astrolabe.
An Artistic Astrolabe
[ From the Archives ] ID #: ST-WA-07 DONOR: EARNEST WATSON MATERIAL: BRASS Do you know more about this specific instrument, or did you use one like it while you were at Caltech? Share your story with alumni@caltech.edu
SEND ALL ADDRESS CHANGES TO: Caltech Alumni Association MC 12001-97E.California Blvd. Pasadena, CA 91125 PHONE: 626.395.6592 EMAIL: INFO@ALUMNI.CALTECH.EDU Alumni Reunion Join fellow Techers in celebrating milestones and life after Caltech FRIDAY–SUNDAY OCTOBER 21-23 alumni.caltech.edu/reunion-weekend
