- Richard Feynman
Richard Phillips Feynman was an American physicist known for expanding the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, and particle theory. For his work on quantum electrodynamics, Feynman was a joint recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, …
- Kip Thorne
Kip Stephen Thorne is an American theoretical physicist, known for his prolific contributions in gravitation physics and astrophysics and for having trained a generation of scientists. A longtime friend and colleague of Stephen Hawking, he is the current Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech and one of the world’s leading experts on the astrophysical implications of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
- Christof Koch
Christof Koch is an American neuroscientist educated in North Africa and Europe. He received a PhD in nonlinear information processing from the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen, Germany in 1982. He currently holds the position of Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology, California Institute of Technology, where he has been since 1986.
- Gordon Moore
Gordon Earle Moore (b. January 3, 1929 in San Francisco, California) is the co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of Intel Corporation and the author of Moore's Law (published in an article 19 April 1965 in "Electronics Magazine"). Moore was born in San Francisco, California. He received a B.S. degree in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1950 and a Ph.D. in Chemistry and Physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1954.
- Charles Elachi
Charles Elachi is the Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), located in Pasadena, California. He has held this position since May 1, 2001 and also holds professorships in electrical engineering and planetary science at Caltech. Elachi was born in Lebanon on April 18, 1947. He graduated from the Grenoble Polytechnic Institute in 1968 and received his M.S. and Ph.D in electrical sciences from the Caltech.
- Carolyn Porco
Carolyn C. Porco is an American planetary scientist and the leader of the imaging science team on the Cassini mission <sup>,<;/sup> <sup>,<;/sup> presently in orbit around Saturn. In late 1999, she was selected by the London Sunday Times as one of 18 scientific leaders of the 21st century, and by Industrial Week as one of "50 Stars to Watch". Porco was responsible for the epitaph and proposal to honor the late renowned planetary geologist, Eugene Shoemaker, …
- Ahmed Zewail
Ahmed Hassan Zewail (born February 26 1946 in Damanhur, Egypt) is an Egyptian American chemist, and the winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on femtochemistry. Born in Damanhur (60 km south-east of Alexandria) and raised in Disuq, he received his first degree from the University of Alexandria before moving from Egypt to the United States to complete his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. After some post doctorate work at the University of California, …
- Robert Kirshner
Robert Kirshner is Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University and an Associate Director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He graduated from Harvard College in 1970 and received a Ph.D. in astronomy at Caltech four years later. After a postdoc at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tucson, he joined the faculty at the University of Michigan for 9 years before moving to the Harvard Astronomy Department in 1986.
- Barry Simon
Barry Simon is an eminent American mathematical physicist and the IBM Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Caltech, known for his prolific contributions in spectral theory, functional analysis, and nonrelativistic quantum mechanics (particularly Schrödinger operators), including the connections to atomic and molecular physics. He has authored more than 300 publications on mathematics and physics.
- Richard Massey
Dr. Richard Massey (born 14 October 1977) is a physicist currently working at Caltech. He is a graduate in Maths and Physics from the University of Durham and completed his Ph.D in Cambridge on Cosmology in 2003. Massey is most well known as the lead author of a recent study to make a dark matter map of the universe, published by Nature magazine.
- Robin Hanson
Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University. He is known as an expert on idea futures markets and was involved in the creation of the Foresight Exchange and DARPA's FutureMAP project. Hanson has expressed great disappointment in the cancellation of the FutureMAP project, and he attributes this to the controversy surrounding the related Total Information Awareness program.
- Ahmed H. Zewail
- Charles Plott
Charles Plott (born 1938), American economist. Plott is Edward S. Harkness Professor of Economics and Political Science at Caltech and a pioneer in the field of experimental economics.
- Preston McAfee
R. Preston McAfee (born July 7, 1956) is the J. Stanley Johnson Professor of Business, Economics, and Management at the California Institute of Technology, where he is the executive officer for the social sciences. He teaches business strategy, managerial economics, and introductory microeconomics. McAfee has joined Yahoo! Research as Research Fellow and Vice President. He leads a group focused on microeconomics research.
- Peter Shor
Peter W. Shor (born August 14, 1959) is an American theoretical computer scientist most famous for his work on quantum computation, in particular for devising a quantum algorithm for factoring exponentially faster than the best currently-known algorithm running on a classical computer (see Shor's algorithm). He was working then at AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1994. Currently, he is a professor of applied mathematics at MIT, …
- David Bohm
David Joseph Bohm (b. December 20 1917, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania - d. October 27 1992, London) was an American-born quantum physicist, who made significant contributions in the fields of theoretical physics, philosophy and neuropsychology, and to the Manhattan Project.
- Leonard Mlodinow
Leonard Mlodinow (born 1954 in Chicago) is a physicist and writer. While a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, and on the faculty at Caltech, he developed (with N. Papanicolaou) a new type of perturbation theory for eigenvalue problems in quantum mechanics. Later, as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysik in Munich, Germany, …
- Sandra Tsing Loh
Sandra Tsing Loh (born 11 February 1962) is a Los Angeles, California-based author, actress and radio commentator. Loh is the daughter of a Chinese father and a German mother who was raised in Southern California, as she frequently mentions in her performances. She graduated from Caltech with a BS in Physics, and returned in 2005 to deliver its commencement speech. She is also a graduate of the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California.
- Anneila Sargent
Anneila Sargent (born 1942) is a Scottish-American astronomer, who specializes in star formation. Sargent completed a BSc Honours degree in Physics at the University of Edinburgh in 1963 and is currently a professor of astronomy at Caltech and has served as director of the Owens Valley Radio Observatory and Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy. She served as president of the American Astronomical Society from 2000 to 2002.
- Ralph Leighton
Ralph Leighton is a biographer and friend of the late Richard Feynman. He recorded Feynman relating stories of his life. Leighton has released some of the recordings as "The Feynman Tapes". These interviews became the basis for the books "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and "What Do You Care What Other People Think?". Leighton is a drummer and co-founder of the group Friends of Tuva.
- Renato Dulbecco
Renato Dulbecco (born February 22, 1914) is an Italian-born virologist. He was born in Catanzaro (Southern Italy) from a Calabrese mother and a Ligurian father. He graduated from high school at 16, then moved to the University of Turin. Despite a strong interest for mathematics and physics, he decided to study medicine. At only 22, he graduated in morbid anatomy and pathology under the supervision of professor Giuseppe Levi.
- Ed Stone
Edward C. Stone is a professor of physics at Caltech. He has been the project scientist of the Voyager spacecraft since 1972. He was the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California from 1991 to 2001. He was the recipient of the 1999 Carl Sagan Memorial Award.
- Halton Arp
Halton Christian Arp is an American astronomer mainly known for Intrinsic redshift and as a main critic of the Standard cosmology. He was born March 21 1927 in New York City. His bachelor's degree was awarded by Harvard (1949), and his Ph.D. from Caltech (1953). Afterwards he became a Fellow of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1953, performing research at the Mount Wilson Observatory and Palomar Observatory.
- Cleve Moler
Cleve Barry Moler is a mathematician and computer programmer specializing in numerical analysis. In the mid to late 1970s, he was one of the authors of LINPACK and EISPACK, Fortran libraries for numerical computing. He invented MATLAB, a numerical computing package, to give his students at the University of New Mexico easy access to these libraries without writing Fortran. In 1984, he co-founded The MathWorks with Jack Little to commercialize this program.
- Sidney Coleman
Sidney Richard Coleman (b. 7 March 1937) is an eminent theoretical physicist who studied under Murray Gell-Mann, receiving his PhD from Caltech in 1962. He is professor emeritus at Harvard University and the author of the classic particle physics text "Aspects of Symmetry", which is a collection of lectures delivered at the International School for Subnuclear Physics in Erice, Sicily. Some of his best known works are Coleman-Mandula theorem and Coleman theorem.
- Ivan Sutherland
Ivan Edward Sutherland (born 1938 in Hastings, Nebraska) is a computer programmer and Internet pioneer. He received the Turing Award in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal computers. Sutherland earned his Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), his Master's degree from Caltech, …
- Jorge Cham
Jorge Cham (born May 1976) is a Chinese-Panamanian post-doc best known for his popular newspaper and web comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD Comics). He first started drawing PhD Comics as a grad student at Stanford University, and has since been syndicated in several university newspapers and in three published book collections. Jorge Cham received his Bachelor's degree from Georgia Tech, and earned a PhD in mechanical engineering from Stanford.
- Vernon L. Smith
Professor Vernon L. Smith pioneered the field of experimental economics nearly 50 years ago. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002 for his contributions to the economic sciences. Before 1956, when Dr. Smith completed his first experiment, economic theory assumed markets are efficient only with a large number of buyers and sellers. Experimental methods were the first to test such theories.
- Peter Schultz
Peter G. Schultz is currently the Scripps Professor of Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute and Director of the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF). Schultz’s work spans the interface of chemistry, biology and materials science, and includes: the discovery of catalytic antibodies and their use to study fundamental mechanisms of biological catalysis and the evolution of binding and catalytic function, …
- K. Mani Chandy
K. Mani Chandy is the Simon Ramo Professor of Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology. He has been the Executive Officer of the Computer Science Department twice, and he has been a professor at Caltech since 1989. Chandy got his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Electrical Engineering with a thesis in Operations Research. He got a Masters from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, …
- Shrinivas Kulkarni
Shrinivas Kulkarni is a professor of astrophysics and planetary science at Caltech. He is also on the Space Interferometry Mission science team and director of Caltech's optical observatories, including Palomar and Keck. Kulkarni is the brother of Sudha Murty.
- Paul MacCready
Paul B. MacCready, Jr. (born September 25, 1925 in New Haven, Connecticut) is an American aeronautical engineer. He is the founder of AeroVironment and the inventor of the first practical flying machine powered by a human being. MacCready graduated from Hopkins School in 1943, received his bachelor's degree in physics from Yale University in 1947, a master's degree in physics from Caltech in 1948, and a PhD in aeronautics from Caltech in 1952.
- Simon Ramo
Simon Ramo (born May 13, 1913) is an American physicist, engineer, and business leader. He led development of microwave and missile technology and is sometimes known as the father of the Intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). He has been partly responsible for the creation of two Fortune 500 companies of the 1970s; Ramo-Wooldridge (TRW after 1958) and Bunker-Ramo (now part of Honeywell). Simon was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, …
- Huck Seed
Huck Seed is easy to spot in a room full of crowded players. His physique is not very easy to ignore, or to forget. He stands at an intimidating height of 6'7" (2.01 m), but what truly strikes fear into the hearts of his opponents is his stone-cold silence at the table. This lanky giant betrays little of what he feels about his cards, attacking instinctively and without mercy.
- Beno Gutenberg
Beno Gutenberg was a German-born seismologist who made several important contributions to the science. He was a colleague of Charles Francis Richter at the California Institute of Technology and Richter's collaborator in developing the Richter magnitude scale for measuring an earthquake's magnitude. Gutenberg was born in Darmstadt, Germany and obtained his Doctorate in Physics from University of Göttingen in 1911. His advisor was Emil Wiechert.
- David J. Stevenson
David J. Stevenson (born September 2,1948) is a professor of planetary science at Caltech. Originally from New Zealand, he received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in physics, where he proposed a model for the interior of Jupiter. He is well-known for applying fluid mechanics and magnetohydrodynamics to understand the internal structure and evolution of planets and moons.
- Charles Ofria
Dr. Charles A. Ofria is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the director of the Digital Evolution (DEvo) Lab at Michigan State University. Ofria's research focuses on the interplay between computer science and Darwinian evolution. Avida is an artificial life software platform to study the evolutionary biology of self-replicating and evolving computer programs (digital organisms).
- Robert B. Leighton
Robert B. Leighton (September 10, 1919-March 9, 1997) was an American physicist who spent his professional career at the California Institute of Technology. His bachelor's, master's and Ph.D. degrees were all from Caltech; he joined the faculty in 1949. His "Principles of Modern Physics" 1959 was a standard textbook. After Richard Feynman's Lectures in Physics course, in the early-1960s, …
- Kenneth G. Wilson
Kenneth Geddes Wilson (born June 8, 1936) is an American theoretical physicist. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he was a Putnam Fellow. He earned his PhD from Caltech in 1961, studying under Murray Gell-Mann. He joined Cornell University in 1963 in the Department of Physics as a junior faculty member, becoming a full professor in 1970. His brother David is also a Professor at Cornell in the department of Molecular Biology and Genetics.
- William Cottrell
William "Billy" Jensen Cottrell (born 1980) is a former Ph.D. candidate at the California Institute of Technology who was convicted in April 2005 of fire-bombing and destroying approximately 125 sport utility vehicles. He was sentenced to eight years in jail on terrorism charges and ordered to pay $3.5 million in restitution.