BECKMAN AUDITORIUM

President Thomas F. Rosenbaum
Sonja and William Davidow Presidential Chair; Professor of Physics 

Learn more about President Thomas F. Rosenbaum

BECKMAN AUDITORIUM

Sandra Tsing Loh (BS ’83, DAA ’01)
Host of “The Loh Down on Science,” syndicated daily on NPR and on The LAist

BECKMAN AUDITORIUM

Faculty Speaker: Gregg Hallinan, PhD
Professor of Astronomy; Director, Owens Valley Radio Observatory

Building the World’s Most Powerful Radio Telescope

Caltech is developing the 2000-antenna Deep Synoptic Array (DSA-2000), a next-generation telescope. Construction will begin in 2026 in a 19 × 15 km radio-quiet valley in Nevada. Funded by Schmidt Sciences, the telescope will feature 2,000 five-meter antennas. Signals will be transmitted via underground fiber-optic cables and combined in a central supercomputer, or “radio camera,” that will process data at a rate of 200 Tb/s, comparable to the total internet traffic in the United States. This unprecedented capability will enable the detection of one billion new radio sources, a hundred times more than all previous radio telescopes combined. The DSA-2000 is expected to drive discoveries across radio astronomy, from identifying exotic neutron stars in the Milky Way to tracking the formation and evolution of supermassive black holes over cosmic time.

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Faculty Speaker: Hannah Druckenmiller, PhD
Assistant Professor of Economics; William H. Hurt Scholar

Using Economics and Machine Learning to Quantify the Costs and Benefits of Land Use Regulation

This talk explores how economics and machine learning intersect to analyze the trade-offs of land use regulation. Using deep learning models, I predict the scope of Clean Water Act regulation and demonstrate how these predictions help quantify its economic costs. This approach provides a foundation for assessing the broader economic impact. The analysis highlights four key findings:

• Recent rule changes have altered regulatory stringency by up to 50%.
• Regulations reduce development activity by 20%, as indicated by permitting data and satellite imagery.
• Clean Water Act restrictions lower non-residential property values by an average of 15%.
• The economic costs of regulation exceed $5 billion annually in some regions.

A data-driven framework is also introduced to estimate the benefits of regulation measured through environmental services, enabling direct comparison with economic costs.

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Faculty Speaker: Sujit Datta, PhD
Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Biophysics

Squishy Engineering: Using Soft Materials to Solve Hard Problems

Soft materials—often called “squishy”—are everywhere. They range from milk (composed of microscopic fat droplets in water) to hair gel (formed by spaghetti-like molecular networks) to dental plaque (which consists of bacteria embedded in a sticky matrix). These materials flow like liquids yet hold their shape like solids, and their properties can change dramatically with slight environmental shifts.

Engineered soft materials can address critical societal challenges: fluid formulations to remove groundwater contaminants and improve water security, gel sorbents that enhance soil water retention for sustainable agriculture, and engineered microbial communities for applications in human health.

This talk will examine experimental, theoretical, and computational methods from applied mathematics, biology, chemistry, engineering, materials science, and physics to study soft materials. It will focus on efforts to predict and control their behavior, establishing principles for designing new materials with tailored properties and advancing solutions to key societal challenges.

BECKMAN AUDITORIUM

Break

Choose from one of three Caltech student speaker presentations during elective sessions. 

Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) Challenge: Elevating Science Communication In Three Minutes | Chen 100 Lecture Hall

Everhart Distinguished Graduate Student Lecture | Beckman Institute Auditorium

Perpall SURF Speaking Competition | Beckman Auditorium 

BECKMAN MALL + LOCATIONS ON CAMPUS

Enjoy music, conversations, and lunch on Beckman Mall and tour featured labs, points of interest, new buildings, and old stomping grounds.

Choose from one of three Caltech student speaker presentations during elective sessions. 

Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) Challenge: Elevating Science Communication In Three Minutes | Chen 100 Lecture Hall

Everhart Distinguished Graduate Student Lecture | Beckman Institute Auditorium

Perpall SURF Speaking Competition | Beckman Auditorium 

BECKMAN AUDITORIUM

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BECKMAN AUDITORIUM

Polar Science Panel

Caltech faculty conduct research in some of Earth’s most extreme and remote environments. In this talk, they will explore how the coldest regions respond to climate change, the physics and deep structure of glaciers and ice sheets, and the connections between their research and the study of icy planetary bodies like Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

Faculty Speaker: Xiaojing (Ruby) Fu, PhD
Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Civil Engineering; William H. Hurt Scholar

Faculty Speaker: Michael Lamb, PhD 
Professor of Geology

Faculty Speaker: Mark Simons, PhD 
John W. and Herberta M. Miles Professor of Geophysics and Director of the Brinson Exploration Hub

Faculty Speaker: Andy Thompson, PhD
John S. and Sherry Chen Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering; Director, Ronald and Maxine Linde Center for Global Environmental Science; Executive Officer for Environmental Science

Faculty Speaker: Zhongwen Zhan, PhD
Professor of Geophysics, Clarence R. Allen Leadership Chair of the Seismological Laboratory, and Director of the Seismological Laboratory

BECKMAN AUDITORIUM

Break

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Faculty Speaker: Matt Thomson, PhD
Professor of Computational Biology; Investigator, Heritage Medical Research Institute

BECKMAN AUDITORIUM

Break

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Faculty Speaker: Azita Emami, PhD
Andrew and Peggy Cherng Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering; Director, Center for Sensing to Intelligence

Brain-Computer Interfaces: A Sensing to Intelligence Approach

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) are technologies that establish direct communication between the brain and external devices, offering potential benefits for individuals with spinal cord injuries. Current systems fail to deliver the precision, speed, degrees of freedom, and robustness of natural motor control. To enhance BCI performance and extend the lifetime of the implants, new approaches for recovering functional information from the brain are necessary.

In this talk, we demonstrate that machine-learning-based approaches can map electrical signals to neural features by jointly optimizing feature extraction and decoding. In all human participants, our proposed neural network significantly improved performance across all metrics. We will also discuss software-hardware co-design approaches for energy-efficient implementation of BCI systems towards miniaturized implantable devices. 

BECKMAN AUDITORIUM

Mario Peraza
Assistant Vice President for Alumni Relations and CEO of the Caltech Alumni Association