Schedule

Beckman Mall

Join us on Beckman Mall to receive your event name badge, program, and sign up for lab tours.

Beckman Auditorium

President Thomas F. Rosenbaum
president of Caltech; Sonja and William Davidow Presidential Chair; professor of physics

Learn more about President Thomas F. Rosenbaum.

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

Beckman Auditorium

Faculty speaker: Sergei Gukov, John D. MacArthur Professor of Theoretical Physics and Mathematics.

At its core, scientific research is a search — a search for new ideas, new patterns, and new ways to explain or prove things. In this talk, I invite you to explore how AI is reshaping different stages of this process. We will see that while AI excels at many tasks, it still hesitates on others, such as long-horizon reasoning or far-out-of-distribution generalization. I view this as good news: it highlights how much meaningful AI research remains to be done. In fact, the goal of expanding AI’s role in mathematical research has become a motivation for advancing AI itself. I am genuinely excited that these two fields have come into such close contact over the past few years.

Order of speakers subject to change.

Enjoy complimentary food and refreshments on Beckman Mall throughout the day.

Beckman Auditorium

Faculty speaker: Jonathan N. Katz, Kay Sugahara Professor of Social Sciences and Statistics, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Elections are often treated as one-off stories, but U.S. legislative races exhibit striking regularities. In this talk, I show how we can identify “empirically verified universals” of electoral politics, patterns that hold across places and decades, and use them to answer practical questions about representation and redistricting. The core idea is to build a realistic, data-generating statistical model of district vote shares, rigorously test it using out-of-sample prediction, and then use the model to separate what we want to know (e.g., partisan bias, responsiveness, incumbency advantages) from how we estimate it, with uncertainty quantified in a principled way.

Order of speakers subject to change.

Enjoy complimentary food and refreshments on Beckman Mall throughout the day.

Beckman Auditorium

Faculty speaker: Ryan G. Hadt, professor of chemistry.

Quantum coherence—the ability for quantum states to exist in well-defined superpositions—lies at the heart of emerging quantum technologies, yet direct experimental access to coherence in molecules remains limited by techniques poorly suited to complex chemical environments. This seminar will describe our development of time-resolved Faraday ellipticity (TRFE), a technique for measuring coherent molecular electron spin superpositions using extremely short laser pulses. This approach enables direct observation of coherence loss (decoherence) on picosecond timescales under ambient conditions. These measurements demonstrate how decoherence serves as a quantitative reporter of local chemical environments. More broadly, TRFE represents a step toward converting spectroscopic coherence into spatially-encoded information, analogous to how magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) transformed nuclear spin relaxation from a spectroscopic observable into a powerful tool for spatially-resolved discovery.

Order of speakers subject to change.

Enjoy complimentary food and refreshments on Beckman Mall throughout the day.

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

Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) Challenge: Elevating Science Communication In Three Minutes  

Everhart Distinguished Graduate Student Lecture  

Perpall SURF Speaking Competition  

Beckman Mall and 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 

Everhart Distinguished Graduate Student Lecture 

Perpall SURF Speaking Competition 

Enjoy complimentary food and refreshments on Beckman Mall throughout the day.

Beckman Auditorium

Faculty speaker: S. Furkan Ozturk, assistant professor and William H. Hurt Scholar.

The origin of life on Earth is one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in science and can only be tackled through an interdisciplinary approach. Moreover, if the origin of life is a planetary phenomenon, the underlying processes are constrained by their geochemical environments, strongly implying the need for an iterative approach between laboratory studies and field investigations. I will discuss the state of the art in the field, with remarks on early Earth’s environments, prebiotic chemistry, and our group’s recent work on the single-handedness of biomolecules.

Order of speakers subject to change.

Enjoy complimentary food and refreshments on Beckman Mall throughout the day.

Beckman Auditorium

Faculty speaker: Pamela J. Bjorkman, the David Baltimore Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering.

Despite successful COVID-19 vaccines, there is an urgent need to combat future SARS-CoV-2 variants and spillovers of SARS-like betacoronaviruses (sarbecoviruses) threatening global health. We designed protein nanoparticles that present eight randomly arranged sarbecovirus spike receptor-binding domains (mosaic-8 nanoparticles) to elicit immune responses against regions that are conserved and relatively occluded rather than variable, immunodominant, and exposed. Mapping experiments demonstrated increased targeting of conserved regions after immunization. Our results suggest that vaccination with mosaic-8 nanoparticles could protect against SARS-CoV-2 variants and future sarbecovirus spillovers from causing another pandemic.

Order of speakers subject to change.

Enjoy complimentary food and refreshments on Beckman Mall throughout the day.

Beckman Auditorium

Faculty speaker: Chiara Daraio, G. Bradford Jones Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics; investigator, Heritage Medical Research Institute.

When we think of engineering materials, we often picture solid blocks such as steel or plastic with fixed properties—soft, lightweight, or strong. In contrast, granular materials such as sand or rice flow and shear. What if a material could do both? Polycatenated Architected Materials (PAMs) are a new class of structures that bridge the gap between solids and fluids. Made of interlocked particles forming intricate 3D networks—akin to modern-day chainmail—PAMs can switch from flowing like granular matter to behaving as solid elastic materials, depending on the applied forces. This unique duality defies conventional theories and enables applications ranging from safer sports gear, reconfigurable robotics, and smart devices for extreme environments. Join us to discover how the geometry and topology of PAMs are redefining what’s possible in material science and engineering.

Order of speakers subject to change.

Beckman Auditorium

Mario Peraza
assistant vice president for Alumni Relations and CEO of the Caltech Alumni Association

Reconnect with fellow alumni, faculty, and friends over dinner and drinks on Beckman Mall. All Seminar Day attendees are welcome.