Astrophysicist and author Ray Jayawardhana became Caltech’s tenth president on July 1. He previously served as provost at Johns Hopkins University and dean of Cornell University’s College of Arts and Sciences, and earlier spent a decade at the University of Toronto. Alongside his academic leadership, he studies the origins and evolution of planetary systems and writes about science for the public. On October 5, Jayawardhana spoke with the Tech about settling into the role and his emerging priorities for research, student life, and Caltech’s impact beyond campus.

Mark Wise died on July 10, 2026. He was a member of the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy at Caltech for forty-three years. The obituaries will say, correctly, that he was one of the great theoretical physicists of his generation: an architect of heavy-quark effective theory, a student of Fred Gilman at Stanford, recruited to Pasadena by Murray Gell-Mann, a member of the P5 panel that set the national course for particle physics, and for sixteen years the principal investigator of Caltech’s high energy physics program. All of that is true, and none of it is the reason the people who worked beside him are bereft.

On October 9, 2023, Mark came to Dabney dinner to present a challenge to Dabney House. He explained that on a recent visit to a colleague, he noticed a LEGO minifigure of the colleague standing on the desk. He thought this was extremely powerful, so he challenged Dabney to make a LEGO minifigure of himself, with a reward of $1000 donated to the house if they could pull it off.

Like many Caltech physics students of my generation (2016-2020), I met Mark during Ph125A. I was the kind of student to sit in the front row and ask questions, so I’d say I got to know him pretty well in class.

I met Mark Wise in 2022, during my freshman year at Caltech. My first-year SURF mentor connected us because of my interests in theoretical particle physics, and his work at the time was directly aligned with our project.

PALAISEAU, France — Rafael Crespo (BS ’26) traded the familiar backdrop of California’s San Gabriel Valley for the suburban outskirts of Paris for a term. As an exchange student at École Polytechnique, known on campus as “L’X,” Crespo found an environment that challenged his Caltech routine in many ways. The sprawling campus sits on a plateau near Palaiseau, a 40-minute train ride outside Paris. The institution traces its roots back to 1794 during the French Revolution, and is one of the wo

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Pizza at 4,630 meters, the Kissing Wall, and one very long summit night. Previously: a lost bag, four rowdy lads from Leeds, and two cold nights on the Machame Route. Now the mountain gets serious. Day 3 The Mountain, a Naughty Babe Altitude gain: 120m A thing about living in Southern California is the sheer amount of Spanish you absorb. Before Caltech, my Spanish was confined to movie references. Those references might raise eyebrows over stereotypes, but for a kid in Sub-Saharan

I was not expecting much from Scandinavia. To be honest, I was a little afraid of whether the locals would be kind to foreigners, bringing back flashbacks of communication difficulties during my time in Japan. I also wondered if the countries, which seemed culturally homogenous, would be welcoming of my family and me, who are fairly Indian — we talk in Tamil and pack our own meals on flights and trains. I was very pleasantly surprised to be proven wrong on all counts. Mostly, I was surprised at

This month, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Caltech are celebrating 90 years of partnership, having worked together on the world’s most advanced guidance and navigation systems in space. In the bird world, many Caltech birds are also masters of precision flight, known for their signature hunting behavior – flycatching. They launch from a stationary position, track a moving target with pinpoint accuracy, intercept it at the best moment, and return to where they started. This sally-and-ret

TACIT House on 275 S. Hill Avenue, made time-traveling haven. (Image: Kari Coleman) As Caltech’s academic year finished up at the end of May, I received a printed invitation to a “Time Traveler Party." The invitation arrived after I attended. Earlier, I’d been directed to a registration link that explained, “Only two events of this kind have been tried before — a time travelers’ convention at MIT

Mark at the blackboard. (Credit: Clara Murgui) Mark B. Wise, Caltech’s John A. McCone Professor of High Energy Physics and a leading theoretical particle physicist, died July 10 at age 72. Wise spent more than four decades at Caltech, where his work helped shape modern particle physics and where generations of students knew him as an unusually approachable professor with a dry sense of humor. His m

Current Caltech undergraduates are talented, accomplished, and frequently dissatisfied. Many leave Caltech less willing to recommend their student experience to others than their peers at MIT and Ivy League schools. Alumni can attest that similar dissatisfaction with the undergraduate student experience was not present in earlier years. What has been lost? Certainly, the stresses of Caltech have not changed. Each year, Caltech recruits the best of the best in science, admitting them in extremely small entering classes (the Class of 2029 has only 248 enrolled students) under highly selective admission standards (the enrolled students in the Class of 2029 reflect only 2.2 percent of the 11,285 individuals who applied for admission).

California needs more homes than it is building. In 2022, the Statewide Housing Plan from the Department of Housing and Community Development called for 2.5 million homes to be built by 2030 in order to address the housing shortage. For the past three years, an average of 104,085 homes per year were authorized by building permits in the state, one-third of the 312,500 annual pace implied by the target. At Nova Cottage Co. in Pasadena, CEO Caroline

Hello everyone from Housing and Dining Services! As we kick off a brand new academic year, we want to take a moment to welcome you all back to campus. We are incredibly excited to see familiar faces and can’t wait to get to know all the new students joining our community this fall. World Cup Food Fest We hope everyone enjoyed last Friday’s (Oct. 2) Food Fest! It was fantastic seeing the community come together to enjoy our World Cup finalist and champion-themed foods, as well as the speci

Arabella Camunez arrived in Denmark ready for a different style of learning. She also found a welcoming community, an abundance of castles and winter days with only a few hours of daylight. Arabella, a member of Caltech’s Class of 2027 studying chemical engineering, spent fall 2025 at the Technical University of Denmark, known as DTU, through Caltech’s Copenhagen Scholars Program. “I have really enjoyed my time at the Danish Technical University,” Arabella wrote. “Both the international studen

The personal belongings of Caltech professors past, including Richard Feynman, Linus Pauling, and Clair Patterson, went on the auction block, among other scientifically historic items. This summer, as part of its Geek Week, Sotheby’s hosted a History of Science & Technology auction at its New York headquarters on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which featured several items that were once housed in Pasadena. Lots spanned over two centuries and numerous fields in science and technology. Items p

A SATIRE advice column about alive, ahaha, and everything in between! Brought to you by the one and only California Tech. See below for wisdom (?) from Quails past and scan the QR code to submit your own questions for future issues! How do Question the Quail articles get written? WATER!!! LOTS OF WATER!!! THAT IS THE ONLY WAY TO WRITE QUAIL ARTICLES SINCE IT IS VERY HOT IN PASADENA!!! **Wh

A budget adventurer, four rowdy lads from Leeds, and one relentless case of gas on the Machame Route There is something out there, and something in here. More often than not, I go looking for what’s out there to forget what’s happening in here. Sometimes it’s simpler than that. Just a burning curiosity about what lies beyond in me: the landscapes, the people, the perspectives, the challenges. This summer, I got the chance to visit the Roof of Africa. The trip was mostly born of a need to do

Young Ventures Adds Caltech to Its Scouting Network Editor’s note: Camilla is a co-founder of Young Ventures and serves as its Caltech partner. Young Ventures is a venture capital platform run by students at nine universities. It launched publicly on September 1 with Caltech as one of its partner schools. The others are Stanford, Harvard, NYU, Cambridge, Oxford, LSE, ETH Zurich and Bocconi. Davide Franchini founded the platform, and each campus has one student partner. The idea is to find

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After five years of volunteering under different acronyms, I officially became by far the oldest orientation leader in fall 2026. I enjoy the festive (and freebie-loaded) orientation weeks, but more importantly, the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed new students rejuvenate my excitement about a place that feels a bit too familiar. The yearly revitalization of our campus matters for both first-years and old-timers. For new students, it is the season to find their footing by declaring majors or joinin

Strictly speaking, predators are animals that eat other animals, so a large proportion of our campus species qualify, including the undergrads ordering beef pho, the squirrels eating baby hummingbirds, and the occasionally cannibalistic turtles. While you are still blinking in disbelief and digesting that info, I am going to limit this column to a few obvious predators: those deemed dangerous by the consensus of two security forces – Caltech Security and the natural security league of American c

With the historic heat wave temporarily subsiding, our Caltech campus settles into a new academic year. As the Tech’s resident wildlife columnist, I’m here to extend a warm welcome to everyone new to Caltech — though after this summer, “warm” may not be the compliment it once was. Like many urban areas around the world, Caltech is an ecosystem where humans and other animals coexist. The campus is small, but a one-hour walk around it can easily turn up thirty wildlife species. In this guide I hi

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NASA announced on May 22 that it will open the next contract to manage and operate the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to competition, marking a potentially significant change in the nearly seven-decade relationship among NASA, Caltech, and JPL. Caltech has managed JPL for NASA since 1958, when the laboratory was transferred from the U.S. Army to the newly established space agency. JPL itself trace

(Photo: Caltech News) As Thomas F. Rosenbaum prepares to conclude twelve years as Caltech’s president, the Institute stands between continuity and transition. Under Rosenbaum’s tenure, Caltech expanded its physical campus, deepened its investment in quantum science and sustainability, increased the proportion of Pell-eligible students, and navigated a turbulent national climate for higher education an

On May 27, California Senator Adam Schiff visited Caltech for a tour that moves from the hardware of quantum computing to the philosophical puzzles of quantum mechanics. Schiff, joined by his wife Eve, toured Prof. Manuel Endres’ lab, met with President Thomas F. Rosenbaum, and spoke with John Preskill about entanglement, hidden variables, many worlds, time travel, and what Feynman might have thought of AI-generated Feynman lectures.

On a Saturday afternoon this spring, part of Caltech’s inaugural Integrated Core cohort found itself somewhere few first-year lab sections go: wandering the aisles of Home Depot. They were looking for tubing, buckets, connectors, and whatever else might help them build small-scale carbon capture systems from scratch. One group was growing algae. Another was working with limestone. A third was thinkin

As Mother’s Day has just passed and Father’s Day is coming up, this issue will talk about parenting in the nonhuman animal world. While all but one photo was taken off campus, a lot of the animals (mostly birds as I am a bird expert) mentioned in this article can be found in the adjacent Pasadena area, so keep your eyes out for spring activity! One of the greatest missions in spring for many animals is to raise a generation of young and graduate them into independent life. This intense process

A year after the Eaton Fire ravaged Altadena, climate scientists are asking uncomfortable questions about why breakthrough discoveries aren’t translating into climate action—and finding answers in community organizing In Chen 100, the evening’s panel wasn’t your typical academic climate discussion. Sure, there were JPL scientists who operate Mars rovers and analyze biodiversity with terabytes of sat

The Tech is collecting student input for future coverage on the Honor Code, exam formats and related topics. Caltech’s Honor Code states, “No member of the Caltech community shall take unfair advantage of any other member of the Caltech community.” In classes, the Honor Code is often reflected in rules about collaboration, outside resources, exams and tools such as large langua

On April 11, Caltech students traveled to the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden in Arcadia for a Make-A-Difference Day service project organized by the Caltech Y. Volunteers spent the morning removing Algerian ivy from tree trunks and root systems, helping protect the Arboretum’s plant life from invasive overgrowth. The 127-acre Arboretum, established as a public garden in 1947, sits on historic Rancho Santa Anita, once known to the native Tongva people as Aleupkigna, or “the plac

May 27, 2026, marked my fifth anniversary of my arrival at Caltech, when I was freshly off the boat – or rather, off the plane. Here in Southern California, the weather seems almost unchanged from one day to the next, and the lack of dramatic seasonal shifts can create the illusion that time is stagnant (unless you are a birder paying close attention to migrants). But as we approach this year’s commencement, I cannot help but reflect on how quickly time has passed. Out of more than 8 billion pe

Hi Tech readers! I’ve been very busy these past two weeks—nonstop lab work on weekends as I finished preparing for one beamtime, and am starting preparations for a second beamtime now! As a result, I did not have time to review any of the remaining restaurants in the SGV Food Passport yet. I will have more time in July, so I will try to swing by them then! For now—because I know you would feel deprived without a food review from me—I will just tell you about an adventure Kayane and I had when

On May 19, an anonymous Reddit user posted in r/Caltech, a Reddit forum for Caltech-related posts, alleging food safety, sanitation, and workplace issues at Browne Dining Hall. The post appeared under the username “No-Environment-3923” and was titled “PSA from a former cook: Be very careful eating at Caltech Dining Halls (Browne).” The Tech messaged the user through Reddit, who accepted the m

Photo credits: Edie Tyebkhan Photography In the bubble of STEM academia, the ages 22-33 are reminiscent of college graduations, graduate studies, and perhaps a postdoc or two while navigating the faculty search process. Along the way, scholars may assemble portfolios and grants alike to request funding for their studies. The musical world is not too different from ours. On April 11, 2026, eight young classical singers showcased their portfolios and competed for grants in the final round

The Library in My Head Was Always Open: A Caltech Student on the Invisible Disabilities We Carry The Body That Betrayed Me, the Mind That Wouldn’t Stop There is a specific kind of silence that lives inside high-achieving students. It is not the silence of a quiet library or a sleeping dorm room. It is the silence of a mind that has been running for so long, so loudly, that the noise has become i

On May 16, in Frautschi Hall, Katherine Vondy’s

There’s a particular kind of audacity required to fail spectacularly at being a cocktail waitress and somehow turn that failure into a career-defining opportunity. Melissa Magsaysay has made a career out of this kind of alchemy—transforming what others might see as limitations into launching pads, and using fashion journalism to reshape who gets to be seen and heard in an industry notorious for its gat

A recent cybersecurity incident involving Canvas, the learning-management system operated by Instructure and used throughout Caltech, disrupted universities during exams week and raised concerns about the possible exposure of user data. Instructure claims it detected unauthorized activity on April 29 and additional related activity on May 7, when some users saw altered Canvas pages; the company temporarily placed Canvas in maintenance mode and late

A courtroom sketch that renders Cole Thomas Allen, center, appearing before U.S. Magistrate Moxila Upadhyaya, in federal court, Thursday, April 30 in Washington. (Image: Dana Verkouteren/AP) Federal authorities have identified Cole Thomas Allen, a 31-year-old Torrance man, as the suspect in the April

Frequent passersby of southwest campus will have noticed a recent shift in the landscape along Wilson Avenue. Large areas of grass have turned brown and crispy, in apparent contrast with the springtime bloom of the surroundings (Figure 1). While it may look unsightly now, this is only the first step in a multi-year project by the Caltech Facilities department to restore this land’s original, natural beauty. ![Figure 1. Photo credit: Michael Gutierrez](https://xguzskbxiptvhbyggkpl.supabase.co/st

(Photo: Bloomberg/Getty Images) All 22 members of the National Science Board (NSB), which oversees the National Science Foundation (NSF), were removed on April 24 without explanation. Members were notified by email that their positions were “terminated, effective immediately.” They included Aaron Dominguez (BS ’92), the board’s vice chair and provost of the Catholic University of America, and board me

The 2016/Coachella-inspired stage was rife with symbols from the era, including Nyan Cat, rainbow poop emojis, dabbing unicorns, and an angelic Harambe (may he rest in peace). (Photos: Damian R. Wilson) On the night of May 16, Fleming House staged its own festival revival with “Flemchella,” a 2016/Coachella-themed Interhouse that invited students to “Blast From the Past” in the Fleming courtyard fro

_The Interhouse featured the promised neon pyramid, a shimmering deluge from a model Nile, eschatological wall art, and

Editor’s Note: What follows is an extract from an achronological artifact recently found on the steps of the Tech’s Pasadena office building: an apparent dispatch from the future, inexplicably recovered in time for our May 19 issue. TACIT House on 275 S. Hill Avenue, made time-traveling haven. (Image: Kari Coleman) Most parties don’t become history. But the ones that do tend

On a warm California evening this past Monday, May 11th, the Dabney Lounge at Caltech became an unlikely intersection of medieval scholarship, literary fiction, and cutting-edge artificial intelligence ethics. In a campus that feels so arid and scientifically focused, escaping for one hour in literature and fancy words was extremely beneficial! Bruce Holsinger, the Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English at the University of Virginia, arrived as someone essential to our current moment: a story

Hello Tech readers! Time for another round of reviews where I explore the San Gabriel Valley food scene with the 2025 MySGV Food Passport. There remains only a few places in Pasadena still to explore: Birria Master, Edwin Mills, O’Seyo Shabu Shabu, All India Café, and Star Leaf. Birria Master’s hours are 5:30 PM to 11 PM, so its been a tricky place to find time for as the early bird I am! Edwin Mills is a place I tried to go on Valentine’s Day, and then again with Kayane another day, but we got

Many know that two CCE research groups are moving from Caltech to CU Boulder. This column will be a way that I keep the Caltech students (myself included) a part of the Caltech community as we finish our PhDs in Colorado. I recently went to Boulder, CO with my best friend Maria to explore the area and check out apartments. Note to the reader: I wrote this article like a scientist with figures called out in the text. Don’t hate me! Haha! My journey began with a flight from Long Beach Airport

![The cast, from left to right: Sullivan Braun as Lt. Nicholas Baron (Baron Tuzenbach), Jacob Buligan as Andrew Prozorov (Andrei), Sarah Gates as Natasha, Prof. Michael Vanier as Dr. John Chamberlain (Ivan Chebutykin), Ellis Spickermann as Irene (Irina), Marcin Kurowski as Lt. Col. Alexander Vershinin, Julie Belville as Masha, Dima Burov as Theodore Culligan (Fyodor Kulygin), Rémy Morgan as Olga, Michael Gutierrez as Cpt. Sully Sullivan (Vassily Solyony), and Therese Bagsit as Anita (Anfisa). (C

Robert Indiana’s LOVE, one of the most recognizable works of 20th-century American art, is set to be part of The Huntington’s permanent collection later this year. Originally created as a drawing in 1964, LOVE turned the everyday word into an iconic symbol. Today, there are more than 50 LOVE sculptures installed worldwide. “We are deeply grateful to Terri and Jerry Kohl for their generosity in making this acquisition possible,” said Karen R. Lawrence, president of The Huntington. “Jerry b

On May 1, 2, and 3, Caltech EXPLiCIT brought another Shakespeare classic to the Ramo Auditorium stage: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s always a pleasure to watch this play, no matter how many versions you’ve already seen. EXPLiCIT is made up of bright, fresh minds with a real interest in art and culture, and that spirit shapes both how they perform and how we receive them. For anyone who doesn’t know the play, Shakespeare weaves together three storylines in Elizabethan style: the Athenian nob

Hello again from Housing and Dining Services! We hope everyone has been having a great term. We wanted to take a moment to drop in and provide some quick information as we head into the final stretch of the academic year. Try the new Vietnamese coffee at Broad Cafe. (Image: Miguel Campos) Housing Updates 2026 Fall Housing Lottery: The Fall Housing Lottery is currently in t