Speakers
and Student Programs
Seminar Day brings together Caltech’s brightest minds. Hear from faculty across all six divisions and watch talented students present their research.
Featured Speakers
Jonathan Katz
Kay Sugahara Professor of Social Sciences and Statistics
Empirically Verified Universals of U.S. Electoral Politics
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.
Biography
Jonathan N. Katz is the Kay Sugahara Professor of Social Sciences and Statistics at Caltech. His research develops statistical methods for the social sciences and uses them to answer substantive questions in political economy and political behavior, with a particular focus on elections and the evaluation of electoral systems.
Katz is Deputy Editor for Social Sciences at Science Advances (since 2018) and previously served as co-editor of Political Analysis (2010–2017). He also served as chair of Caltech’s Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences from 2007 to 2014 and has long been involved with the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project.
Beyond academia, Katz has an active statistical consulting practice that often centers on how quantitative evidence is generated, evaluated, and communicated in high-stakes settings, including election-related litigation. He has also served in datascience and advisory roles with start-ups and industry.
Katz is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an inaugural fellow of the Society for Political Methodology; he also received the Society’s 2024 Career Achievement Award. He earned his S.B. in applied mathematics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego, and held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University before joining the faculty at Caltech, after an appointment at the University of Chicago.
Ryan Hadt
Professor of Chemistry
Quantum Coherence as a Chemical Observable
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.
Biography
Ryan G. Hadt received his BS and MS degrees in chemistry at the University of Minnesota Duluth (with V. N. Nemykin) and his PhD at Stanford University (with E. I. Solomon). He was a visiting postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University (with D. G. Nocera) before continuing research at Argonne National Laboratory as a postdoctoral appointee (with L. X. Chen) and later as an Enrico Fermi Fellow. He was promoted to Professor of Chemistry in the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology in 2025. Professor Hadt is a recipient of the Sloan Research Fellowship, NSF and DOE Early Career Awards, the Cottrell Scholar Award, and an NIH Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award. His research focuses on developing and applying advanced spectroscopic methods to understand transition-metal electronic structure and dynamics, with applications spanning catalysis, photophysics, and quantum information science.
S. Furkan Ozturk
Assistant Professor of Geobiology and Geochemistry; William H. Hurt Scholar
Quo Vadis: The Origin of Life on Earth
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.
Biography
S. Furkan Ozturk is an Assistant Professor of Geochemistry and Geobiology and a William H. Hurt Scholar at the California Institute of Technology, where he leads the Ozturk Lab in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences. He received his BS in Physics from Bilkent University in 2018 and his PhD in Physics from Harvard University in 2024, where he was awarded the Goldhaber Prize for his doctoral thesis on the origins of life’s homochirality. Following his PhD, Dr. Ozturk held postdoctoral research positions as a Kavli–Laukien Fellow at the Harvard College Observatory and jointly as a Research Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge in the UK. He joined Caltech in 2025. Dr. Ozturk is an interdisciplinary researcher whose work explores the physical mechanisms that link biochemical and geological processes, with the overarching goal of understanding how these mechanisms shape the dynamics and organization of complex natural systems. His research focuses, in particular, on the origins of life, biomolecular homochirality, and the role of spin-dependent phenomena in biochemistry and geochemistry.
Student Programs
Seminar Day’s elective sessions showcase exceptional student research and communication. Choose from three programs running concurrently during the elective blocks.
3MT Challenge
Watch graduate students present their research in just three minutes—no jargon, no slides, just clear and compelling storytelling. Part of a global competition designed to make academic research accessible to any audience.
Everhart Lecture
Hear from a 2026 Everhart Finalist in this special lecture for the Caltech community. The Everhart series recognizes graduate students who combine outstanding research with exceptional presentation skills, addressing current scientific questions at a level accessible to all fields.
Perpall SURF Speaking Competition
Meet a winner of the Perpall SURF Speaking Competition, selected from nearly 200 undergraduates who presented their summer research. Established in 1993 to honor effective science communication, the Perpall competition has become one of Caltech’s most prestigious undergraduate honors.
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