Gerald J. Wasserburg, John D. MacArthur Professor of Geology and Geophysics, Emeritus, passed away on June 13, 2016. He was 89 years old.

Wasserburg's work established a time scale for the development of the early solar system including the end of the process of nucleosynthesis—the process by which atoms heavier than hydrogen formed—and the formation about 4.5 billion years ago of solid objects such as the earth and the moon, other planets, and certain meteorites. He also is acknowledged widely for his isotope studies of lunar materials collected by the Apollo missions and his involvement in U.S. space research programs. He and his colleagues also did important work on the dating of rocks, on the evolution of the earth through time, and on the modern oceans.

Wasserburg was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, on March 25, 1927. He served in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1946, then graduated from high school. He enrolled at Rutgers University under the GI bill, and later transferred to the University of Chicago, from which he earned his SB (1951), SM (1952), and PhD (1954) degrees.

Wasserburg joined Caltech faculty in 1955 as an assistant professor of geology. He became an associate professor in 1959, professor of geology and geophysics in 1963, MacArthur Professor in 1982, and he retired in 2001. He served as chair of the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences from 1987 to 1989 and as executive officer for geochemistry over the same time period.

Not long after his arrival at Caltech, Wasserburg began the work that he is most famous for: leading the construction of the Lunatic I, a mass spectrometer for making high-precision measurements of lunar samples obtained by the Apollo missions.

The Lunatic I—now held in the collections of the National Museum of American History—"revolutionized the field of geochemistry," says Donald Burnett, professor of nuclear geochemistry, emeritus, and one of Wasserburg's longtime colleagues. "It totally changed the world because the precision with which you measure ratios of isotopes was an order of magnitude greater than before."

Radioactive isotopes decay at a known rate into other isotopes. For example, about 10 percent of potassium-40 decays produce argon-40, with a half-life of 1.25 billion years. That means that one-half of the atoms of potassium-40 in a given sample—within a rock specimen recovered from the moon, for example—will decay over a 1.25 billion-year time span and about 10 percent of those decays yield argon-40; over the next 1.25 billion years, half of the remaining potassium-40 atoms will decay, and so on. Such rates of decay, which vary from isotope to isotope, provide a "clock" that can be used to determine the age of the specimen, provided you have an accurate accounting of the isotopes in your sample.

The Lunatic I was built at Caltech's Central Engineering Services and installed in a new lab on the second floor of the Arms Laboratory at Caltech that Wasserburg named the "Lunatic Asylum." Mass spectrometers separate ionized atoms according to their mass, and the Lunatic I—developed by Wasserburg and his then-graduate student Dimitri Papanastassiou (BS '65, PhD '70), now a faculty associate in geochemistry—was the first such instrument that was fully digital, with computer-controlled magnetic field scanning and rapid switching and digital ion beam measurement, enabling it to measure reliably isotope ratios with a precision that was a factor of 30 better than earlier instruments. "Those were exciting times," Papanastassiou says. "We were doing things that nobody else could do."

Wasserburg was invited in 1967 to be part of the team of scientists that would handle the initial processing of all of the lunar rocks collected by the Apollo astronauts. Together with Bob Walker of Washington University, Jim Arnold of the University of California at San Diego, and Paul Gast of Columbia University, he was one of the "Four Horsemen"—senior scientists who advised NASA during the Apollo missions.

The "inmates" of the Asylum (as Wasserburg referred to them) were among several teams of researchers to receive lunar rocks from the Apollo 11 mission, which, in July 1969, was the first to land humans on the moon. Each team had been tasked with independently studying the rocks—including to determine their age—with the results to be presented at the first Lunar Science Conference, held in Houston in January 1970.

At the conference, Wasserburg and his colleagues announced that the samples they had analyzed with Lunatic I were between 3.5 and 3.7 billion years old, with a high degree of accuracy. "Afterward, you saw everyone running around trying to quickly revise their talks," Burnett recalls. "They had numbers for the age of the rocks too, but their margins of error were too big to be meaningful."

Wasserburg continued research on lunar samples through the end of the Apollo program. The crew of the Apollo 13 mission—which was forced to abort its lunar landing because of an onboard explosion—gave Wasserburg a photo bearing the inscription, "Sorry we couldn't bring back any rocks." It remained on his wall for decades.

When President Richard Nixon moved to cancel the final Apollo missions, the Four Horsemen organized a protest from the scientific community. The Apollo 16 and 17 missions were reinstated.

In later research, Wasserburg discovered the presence of the decay products of the short-lived radioactive isotope aluminum-26 in the oldest remnants of the solar system, suggesting that a nearby supernova contributed matter to the solar nebula shortly before it collapsed and accreted to form the sun and planets. Lunatic 1 also played a key role in discovering the first evidence of the "late heavy bombardment", a period, roughly 4 billion years ago, when the moon was pummeled by asteroids and comets. Ultimately, his advances in dating techniques contributed to the timeline for the evolution of the solar system that we know today.

Colleagues remember Wasserburg as a driven and competitive scientist who was always excited about his work. "Every day, he really believed that the work he'd done in the lab yesterday was the best science of the past 10 years," Burnett says. Wasserburg's painstaking attention to detail was well known. "He had very high standards for himself and everyone else, and was strongly supportive of young scientists at the Institute" says Geoffrey Blake (PhD '86), professor of cosmochemistry and planetary sciences and professor of chemistry. "Those are the kind of people who make Caltech special."

Wasserburg was the recipient of the Crafoord Prize in Geosciences in 1986 and numerous other honors, including the Arthur L. Day Medal from the Geological Society of America (1970), the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal (1972 and 1978), the Wollaston Medial of the Geological Society of London (1985), the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1991), and the William Bowie Medal of the American Geophysical Union (2008). He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Science, and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

He is survived by Naomi Wasserburg, his wife of more than 60 years, and his sons Charles and Daniel Wasserburg.

Charles W. Peck (PhD '64)—an eminent physicist, dedicated educator, and former chair of the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA) at Caltech—passed away on Thursday, July 21, 2016. He was 81 years old.

Peck was born November 29, 1934 in Freer, Texas, and earned his bachelor of science degree from New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts in 1956. He went to Caltech for his graduate studies, receiving a PhD in 1964. Peck spent his entire professional career at Caltech, first as a research fellow (1964–65) and then as assistant professor (1965–69), associate professor (1969–77), and professor of physics. He retired in 2004. From 1983 to 1986, Peck served as executive officer for physics; he was PMA chair from 1993 to 1998.

Peck was a "great scientist, a kind individual, and an amazingly dedicated and successful teacher," says Fiona Harrison, the Benjamin M. Rosen Professor of Physics and the Kent and Joyce Kresa Leadership Chair of PMA. He was twice (in 1988 and 2001) the recipient of an award for teaching excellence from the Associated Students of the California Institute of Technology (ASCIT) and received an award for teaching excellence from the Graduate Student Council in 1993.

Peck's research was in the area of experimental particle physics, designing and conducting experiments to study the basic constituents of matter. As a graduate student, he used the electron synchrotron at Caltech to investigate a class of exotic short-lived particles known as "strange." He participated in a wide range of accelerator-based studies aimed at probing the structure and properties of quarks—the fundamental building blocks of matter—and at clarifying the nature of the strong and weak nuclear interactions, two of the four fundamental forces of nature.

"The first I heard of the legendary Charlie Peck was when I joined [the late] Bob Walker's group in my first year in the physics program at Caltech," recalls Elliott Bloom (PhD '67) of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. "Charlie was a senior graduate student working with Bob; he had spent a large part of his graduate student career getting the electron synchrotron to work and was finally able to complete his thesis doing physics with this machine. His work on the machine enabled a long line of graduate students to much more rapidly obtain their degrees, including me. We all loved him for that alone."

When the "charm" quark, a previously unknown type of matter, was discovered in the 1970s, Peck and Bloom invented and built a totally new type of particle detector they called the "Crystal Ball." It was a hermetically sealed detector that accurately measured all photons that emerged from particle collisions, enabling important studies of the properties of charmed quarks. This device proved to be both powerful and productive, not only for understanding charm quarks, but for many follow-on experiments, including pivotal studies of the subsequently discovered "bottom" quark.

"Charlie hired me fresh out of graduate school to work on the Crystal Ball, to my considerable good fortune," recalls Professor of Physics Frank Porter (BS '72). "He loved his teaching and his research and was always cheerful when doing either. I remember Charlie best in front of an oscilloscope poking away at some subtlety of an apparatus. It was a great temptation to join him on such occasions, first because I knew it would be fun, and second because I would certainly learn something."

With his longtime friend and colleague Barry Barish, Ronald and Maxine Linde Professor of Physics, Emeritus, Peck was one of the leaders of a large international collaboration that performed a search for magnetic monopoles. Magnetic monopoles are the magnetic analog of single electric charges and have been sought for more than 100 years. They could provide a key confirmation of Grand Unified Theories that seek to unify three of nature's four forces—the electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces—into a single force. The experiment, MACRO (Monopole, Astrophysics, and Cosmic Ray Observatory), was located 3200 feet under the Grand Sasso mountain in Italy. Although the experiment did not find magnetic monopoles, it set what are still the most stringent limits on their existence.

"My favorite image of Charlie was 6000 miles from Pasadena deep under the Gran Sasso mountain, where he was patiently sitting and explaining physics to our graduate students," Barish says.

Peck is survived by his wife, Kathleen, and by four children from a previous marriage.

Ahmed Zewail, the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemistry, professor of physics, and director of the Physical Biology Center for Ultrafast Science and Technology at Caltech, passed away on Tuesday, August 2, 2016. He was 70 years old.

Zewail was the sole recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his pioneering developments in femtoscience, making possible observations of atoms in motion on the femtosecond (10^-15 seconds) time scale. These developments led to the establishment of the discipline of femtochemistry. More recently, he and his group developed "4D" electron microscopy for the direct visualization in the four dimensions of space and time of materials and biological behaviors.

For his contributions to science and for his public service, Zewail received honors from around the globe. Fifty honorary degrees in the sciences, arts, philosophy, law, medicine, and humane letters were conferred on him, including those from Oxford University, Cambridge University, Peking University, École Normale Supérieure, Yale University, University of Pennsylvania, and Alexandria University.

Zewail was decorated with the Order of the Grand Collar of the Nile, Egypt's highest state honor, and was named to the Order of Légion d'Honneur by the President of France, among other state honors. He was an elected member of academies and learned societies including the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of London, the American Philosophical Society, the French Academy, the Russian Academy, the Chinese Academy, and the Swedish Academy. Postage stamps have been issued in commemoration of his contributions to science and humanity.

"Ahmed was the quintessential scholar and global citizen," says Caltech president Thomas F. Rosenbaum, the Sonja and William Davidow Presidential Chair and professor of physics. "He spent a lifetime developing instruments that interrogate nature in fundamentally new ways, and defining new directions that cut across the physical and biological sciences. Ahmed's fervor for discovery never abated and he serves as an inspiration to colleagues and generations of students. The Caltech community deeply mourns his loss."

"Ahmed Zewail was a great man for chemistry, for science, and for society. All of us at Caltech grieve his loss," says Jacqueline K. Barton, Arthur and Marian Hanisch Memorial Professor of Chemistry and Norman Davidson Leadership Chair of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering.

Among the more than 100 international prizes and awards, he was the recipient of the Albert Einstein World Award, the Benjamin Franklin Medal, the Leonardo da Vinci Award, the Robert A. Welch Award, the Wolf Prize, the King Faisal Prize, the Othmer Gold Medal, and the Priestley Gold Medal. In his name, international prizes have been established in Amsterdam, Cairo, Detroit, Trieste, and Washington, D.C.; in Cairo, the AZ Foundation provides support for the dissemination of knowledge and for merit awards in arts and sciences.

Following the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the government established Zewail City of Science and Technology as the national project for scientific renaissance, and Zewail became its first chair of the Board of Trustees.

In 2009, President Barack Obama appointed Zewail to the Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and in the same year he was named the first U.S. Science Envoy to the Middle East. Subsequently, in 2013, Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon invited Zewail to join the U.N. Scientific Advisory Board. In Egypt, he served in the Council of Advisors to the President.

Zewail was the author of some 600 articles and 14 books, and was known for his effective public lectures and writings not only on science but also in global affairs. For his leadership role in these world affairs, he received, among others, the "Top American Leaders Award" from TheWashington Post and Harvard University.

Born in 1946 in Damanhur, Egypt, Zewail received his early education in Egypt and earned his BS and MS degrees from Alexandria University in 1967 and 1969. He received a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974 and completed an IBM postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley before joining the faculty at Caltech in 1976 as an assistant professor. He became an associate professor in 1978 and a professor in 1982. He was Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Physics from 1990–97, was named professor of physics in 1995, and was named Linus Pauling Professor of Chemistry in 1997.

Zewail is survived by his wife, Dema Faham, and his four children, Maha, Amani, Nabeel, and Hani. 

To expand weekend on-campus dining options, Chandler Café is now open from 9 a.m.–3 p.m. each Saturday and Sunday. The expanded hours will be offered while school is in session and will be suspended during academic breaks.

Jon Webster, senior director of dining services, says the change went into effect October 1. "Caltech Dining has been experimenting with weekend service for the past two years to enhance student life on campus," he notes. "Now that we have fully committed to these services, we want to extend them to the whole of the Caltech community."

Students, staff members, faculty, and members of the local community are welcome to dine at the café, although transactions will be cashless: only credit cards and Caltech ID cards will be accepted for payment. Hot meals will be offered, with a rotating selection of food service stations open on any given day.

For more information, contact Jon Webster.

Institute arborists recently treated the ancient Engelmann oak tree adjacent to Millikan pond for a fungal infection that has left it struggling to take in water and nutrients. 

The condition of the tree, which is estimated to be more than 400 years old, has been exacerbated by the recent drought; as a result, the oak is now severely weakened, according to Delmy Emerson, director of buildings and grounds. The treatment to save the tree is considered the last resort.

Microsoft founder and billionaire philanthropist visited Caltech on October 20 to learn about research being conducted in several labs on campus; to catch up with former Harvard classmate Caltech President Thomas Rosenbaum; and to participate in a question-and-answer session, moderated by professor of English and Dean of Undergraduate Students Kevin Gilmartin, with Caltech students at the Beckman Auditorium. We caught up with him after the event to discuss science, giving, and the value of a broad education.

Why did you choose to visit Caltech, and why now?

I tend to visit top universities. I always admire the work being done here, and a good friend of mine, [Caltech trustee] Ron Olson, encouraged me to come to Caltech. It's always energizing to hear about the science.

In your meetings with faculty today, what did you find most interesting and inspiring, particularly as it relates to the work of your foundation?

All of the biology stuff I saw was in line with the Foundation's huge global health program. Cystic fibrosis is not a disease we work on, but [in the lab of Dianne Newman, Gordon M. Binder/Amgen Professor of Biology and Geobiology], they're working on bacterial infections. The insights she has on bacterial infections are of great interest to us. For example, we talked about tuberculosis, which is a huge program area for us. Some of the new approaches she's invented— including being able to make things more visible and how you get viruses in—are going to be helpful to us.

And then, some of it was more basic, like the optogenetics, which was super impressive, or looking at the mitochondria and understanding how deficits in mitochondria affect various disease including neurological and other aging disorders.

I'm personally investing in energy and I've known Nate Lewis [George L. Argyros Professor of Chemistry at Caltech] for a long time, so I got an update on the work he's doing on solar fuels.

On your blog, you called on leaders to invest in great research institutions. What role do you think that institutions like Caltech can play in solving the great challenges facing humanity today?

Caltech's doing an amazing job. It's a real gem, and it's able to be so ambitious partly because of the government research budgets and the philanthropy, but the government research budgets are the biggest parts of it. Caltech is able to attract top scientists and it'd be great if government research allowed Caltech to be more ambitious.

Nate Lewis and I went through a lot of things he'd be able to do if he had more research money. He and I were brainstorming about whether startups could, or should, do any part of that, and what trends are likely with energy research funding. The U.S. has been the best, even though the U.S. should do more. People complain appropriately that energy research funding hasn't gone up much recently, but compared to other countries it's much higher. The benefits are pretty dramatic.

In the Q&A, you talked about the transition from being someone who was focused on technology and computers to someone with a broader world-view. As STEM educators, how can we make sure that we provide a solid STEM education to help these students become the scientists and engineers of the future, but also make sure to give them that broad world view?

It's a super important thing. In the Harvard curriculum—that's where I was a dropout—they divided the world into three things: natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and forced you to take a diverse set across all three. I'm a natural scientist—I was in applied mathematics in my failed undergraduate career—or "early terminated.""Failed" is a little too dramatic because my grades were quite good. The way their system worked, it was harder to know other sciences, so all my natural science time had to be in applied math.

Now I was a strange case. I audited as many courses as I was signed up for, and I never attended the course that I was signed up for—I attended the one I was auditing. So I got to go to a lot of courses and get a lot of diversity. But you have to be careful with trying to push people. The thing that works best is grabbing their interest.

I've worked with a guy named David Christian on a project called Big History. It was a college course, and I worked with him to turn it into a 9th-grade course. It provides a broad framework of how everything fits together. All your other knowledge can fit into that framework and it doesn't wind up being disconnected and endless and confusing. I think people are more intellectually ambitious if they start to see the bridges between different pieces of knowledge.

When you speak to students like this, you're talking to the next generation of scientists and engineers—maybe even the next Bill Gates. What message do you want them to walk away with?

Well, there is an irony that I went back to Harvard and gave a speech and Mark Zuckerberg was in the audience [laughs]. Now, I don't claim it had an influence on him, and he and I are good friends, but it was kind of a funny thing.

I do think it helped me that I could read about business careers or science careers where people had been wildly ambitious and managed to do well. [Caltech Professor of Physics and Nobel Laureate] Richard Feynman was somebody who I admired. He gave a series of lectures at Cornell, called the Messenger Series, that are aimed at people who are not scientists and which try to explain what science is and why it's fun and interesting. It's just brilliant.

Hopefully I can encourage people to be ambitious. When you're young, you often see things that other people don't see. A ton of the creativity comes out of people in their 20s or 30s. And in this case, they're at one of the best institutions in the world. It's an amazing thing. And the institution is amazing at picking the right people to come, so their capabilities are pretty incredible.

Three new members—Spencer Abraham, Rebecka Belldegrun and alumna Ann Stimmler Johnson—have been elected to the Caltech Board of Trustees. Abraham and Belldegrun will serve as trustees and Johnson (BS '99, MS '00) as a young alumni trustee.

Spencer Abraham is the former U.S. Secretary of Energy during the first term of President George W. Bush (2001–05) and also a former U.S. Senator from Michigan (1995–2001).

Abraham led the cabinet agency with a $23 billion budget and over 100,000 federal and contractor employees. The Department of Energy is a diverse agency that includes 17 National Laboratories; the National Nuclear Security Administration, which operates the nuclear weapons complex and non-proliferation programs; a Science program that is the nation's single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences; and a $7 billion environmental cleanup program, which is the largest on the planet.

Abraham is currently chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of The Abraham Group, an international strategic consulting firm focused on the energy sector, based in Washington, D.C. He is also a principal at Blank Rome Government Relations, also based in Washington, D.C.

Abraham holds a BA from Michigan State University and a JD from Harvard University, where he cofounded the Federalist Society.

Rebecka Belldegrun is a physician, entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist, and the founder of several companies and a cable television network.

Born in Finland, she earned her MD at the Sacker School of Medicine at Tel-Aviv University and completed a residency in ophthalmic surgery in Israel. She then moved to the United States for a postdoctoral fellowship in corneal surgery at Harvard Medical School.

Her career path ultimately pivoted toward business and in 1986 she became president and founder of Intertech Corporation Inc., a New York-based real estate and acquisitions company. In 2004 she founded BellCo Capital LLC, a management consulting and investment company in Los Angeles, where she serves as president and CEO. Two years later she became the founding investor of BabyFirstTV, a global cable channel dedicated to babies and their parents.

She previously served on a variety of boards, including the Board of Visitors at Columbia University. She currently serves on the Board of Trustees at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

Ann Stimmler Johnson is cofounder and CEO of Interana, which describes itself as the leader in behavioral analytics for the digital economy and was formed in 2012.

Interana provides a self-service, behavioral analytics solution that seeks to help every employee across an organization explore the digital behavior patterns of people and things in order to make well-informed business decisions. Interana's vision is to put the power of interactive data exploration in the hands of everyone to help businesses realize a successful digital transformation.

While earning her degrees in electrical engineering at Caltech, Johnson was selected for the Intel scholarship program. She served as new product manager and integration engineer at Intel from 2000 to 2003 and from 2005 to 2006.

The Board of Trustees is the governing body of Caltech. The Board is led by Chair David L. Lee (PhD '74) and Vice Chair Ronald K. Linde (MS '62, PhD '64). It is currently composed of 40 trustees, 28 senior trustees, 19 life members, and one honorary life member.

John D. ("Jack") Roberts, Institute Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus, at Caltech and former provost, passed away on October 29, 2016. He was 98.

Roberts was a pioneer in the field of physical organic chemistry. He brought nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to organic chemistry, allowing chemists to determine the structures of complex biological molecules. He also used radioactive tracers to study the thermal rearrangements of small-ring hydrocarbons to better understand how the reactions work on a mechanistic level.

"Jack Roberts put a firm intellectual underpinning to how reactions in organic chemistry proceed from reactant to product," says Peter Dervan, the Bren Professor of Chemistry at Caltech. "He was truly one of the early pioneers in the early 1950s, developing methods to characterize transient intermediates in chemical reactions."

"Jack Roberts epitomized what makes Caltech special—a great scientist and educator, crossing disciplinary boundaries, to make a difference in all of our lives," says Jacqueline Barton, the Arthur and Marian Hanisch Memorial Professor of Chemistry and Norman Davidson Leadership Chair in the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering.

Roberts earned many awards for his scientific achievements, including the American Chemical Society's top prize, the Priestley Medal, in 1987, and the National Medal of Science in 1990. In 1998, Chemical & Engineering News named him as one of the 75 most influential chemists in the last 75 years. When he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1956 at the age of 38, he was the youngest member elected at that time.  

George Whitesides, a professor of chemistry at Harvard University who received his Caltech PhD from Roberts in 1964, remembers him as "one of the last of a generation of giants in academic science," adding, "the world will be much the poorer without him—adamantine intellectual standards, rigorous honesty, incorrigible bossiness, adventurousness, warmth, generosity, and all the rest."

One of his key discoveries was of a transitional compound in organic reactions involving the carbon-containing ring called benzene. Roberts discovered in 1953 that benzene can be converted to a short-lived unstable compound named benzyne, in which two of the carbons in the six-membered ring are connected to each other by a triple bond.

"When he first proposed benzyne, nobody believed it. This is certainly one of his landmark discoveries," says Harry Gray, Caltech's Arnold O. Beckman Professor of Chemistry and founding director of the Beckman Institute. "Benzene goes to benzyne with a rearrangement of chemical bonds, and the chemical bonds that Jack Roberts proposed were really off the charts at the time."

Back in the 1950s, long before magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines became a staple of orthopedic clinics, Roberts's work with NMR revolutionized organic chemistry, enabling chemists to characterize the structure of organic molecules and to study rapidly equilibrating conformations, or shapes, of molecules in solution.

Roberts got his first exposure to the power of NMR spectroscopy on a 1954 consulting trip to the Du Pont chemical company, a firm with which he maintained a lifelong relationship. At Caltech, chemistry division chair Linus Pauling bought an NMR machine for Roberts for the study of organic compounds—the first such machine ever to be sold to a university. Through the years, Roberts helped develop more complex methods for NMR spectroscopy and ultimately was able to use the technique to obtain structural information for large biological molecules, such as steroids and enzymes.

A native of Los Angeles, Roberts was born on June 8, 1918. He graduated from Los Angeles High in 1936 along with his future wife, Edith. The two married in 1942. Roberts received both his bachelor of arts (1941) and his doctorate (1944) degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Following positions at UCLA, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he came to Caltech in 1952 and became a professor of organic chemistry in 1953. In 1972, he was appointed Institute Professor of Chemistry and, in 1988, Institute Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus, and lecturer.

Roberts served as the chair of Caltech's Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering from 1963 to 1968 and the acting chair from 1972 to 1973. From 1980 to 1983, he served as Caltech's vice president, provost, and dean of the faculty. "Jack Roberts not only was a great mentor to students, he was a great mentor to the faculty," says Barton.

After his retirement in 1988, Roberts continued mentoring undergraduate students until his mid-90s as part of Caltech's Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program. "He was a fabulous mentor to undergrad students. He has the record for mentoring undergraduate students in the SURF program," says Gray.

Roberts was an outdoors enthusiast and avid tennis player. He was also a family man, with four children. He and his wife were active philanthropists in the Pasadena area, and supported the Pasadena Symphony.

"There's Jack Roberts, the mentor to undergraduate kids; there's Jack Roberts, the leader of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Caltech; there's Jack Roberts, the gruff character that everybody argues with; and there's Jack Roberts, the loveable guy, and a family man with a wonderful family," says Gray.

"Jack Roberts and his wife, Edith made a big impact not only on the Caltech campus but on the entire Pasadena community," says Dervan.

Roberts brought the first female graduate student, Dorothy Semenow, to Caltech when he moved from MIT in 1952. "He was very proud of opening a pathway for women students at Caltech," says Barton.

He published more than 540 papers and authored or coauthored 12 textbooks, including ABCs of FT-NMR and Basic Principles of Organic Chemistry. In 1990, he published his autobiography, The Right Place at the Right Time.

Roberts was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2008 and, in 2009, Fellow of the American Chemical Society. He was a member of the American Chemical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences.

In addition to the Priestley Medal and the National Medal of Science, Roberts was the recipient of the Glenn T. Seaborg Medal (1991), the Chemical Pioneer Award of the American Institute of Chemists and the Arthur C. Cope Award of the American Chemical Society (both in 1994), the NAS Award in Chemical Sciences (1999), the NAS Award for Chemistry in Service to Society (2009), and the American Institute of Chemists Gold Medal (2013), among many other honors.

He is survived by his four children—Anne, Donald, John, and Allen—as well as nine grandchildren and one great grandchild. Three of his children are doctors and the other is an electrical engineer and entrepreneur. 

The Caltech Board of Trustees has awarded the Institute's highest honor, the Robert A. Millikan Medal, to Donald Bren, chairman of the Irvine Company and a life member of the Caltech Board of Trustees.

The Millikan Medal was created to honor the life and ideals of Robert Andrews Millikan, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, cofounder of the modern California Institute of Technology, and chairman of the Institute's Executive Council for 23 years. In his lifetime, Millikan was arguably the most famous scientist in the United States.

The Board of Trustees awards the Millikan Medal to individuals who reflect Millikan's standard of excellence and serve the Institute that he founded with particular distinction and dedication. The medal has been given to only a select few individuals over the past three decades, including Robert A. Day, Si Ramo (PhD '36), Arnold Beckman (PhD '28) and Earle Jorgensen, Bren's stepfather, who also served as a Caltech Trustee for over 40 years.

Bren—who has been on the Board of Trustees for 33 years and a life member since 2004, and the single largest supporter of endowed professorial chairs at Caltech—was awarded the medal by resolution of the Board on July 28.

The medal was conferred upon him during a dinner Friday, October 28, at the Caltech Board of Trustees' annual retreat in Newport Beach.

"The Millikan Medal is awarded to the individuals who have served Caltech with particular distinction and dedication," said David Lee (PhD '74), chair of Caltech's Board of Trustees, during that event. "As such, Donald will be joining the very distinguished and select company of the Millikan Medal recipients."

"Millikan saw an opportunity to combine different ways of elucidating and influencing the world to create a new approach to discovery, progress, and transformation," said Caltech president Thomas Rosenbaum, the Sonja and William Davidow Presidential Chair and professor of physics. "It is in this context that we honor Donald Bren this evening, with the awarding of the Millikan Medal. For Donald has not only transformed the urban landscape of California. He has transformed the intellectual landscape of the California Institute of Technology."

In their resolution conferring the medal upon Bren, the Board noted Bren's decades of service to the Institute, including his efforts to facilitate the expansion of Caltech's biology-focused programs and the construction of the Broad Center for the Biological Sciences and his service and guidance for over a decade as vice chair and chair of the Buildings and Grounds Committee, in which capacity he encouraged the Board and the administration to think strategically about the campus and the development of its property, guiding the Institute's development of the campus Master Plan.

The Board also recognized Bren's efforts to protect the sensitive astronomical instruments of the Palomar Observatory from the effects of light pollution generated in San Diego County and his "exceptional management expertise, business acumen, and keen attention to detail," with which he benefitted Caltech by assessing the Institute's fiscal condition, business operations, and budgetary practices.

Bren, the Board resolution further noted, "articulated a profound vision for investing in big ideas at Caltech—ideas and initiatives that challenge intellectual boundaries while keeping the Institute resilient through the targeted use of physical and intellectual capital," and has "deployed his extraordinarily generous philanthropic gifts to the California Institute of Technology in a manner that has indelibly enriched the Institute's education and research mission."

In accepting the medal, Bren said, "As each year goes by, I watch with tremendous satisfaction as this wonderful institution continues to grow, in stature and in reputation, in large measure because of its educational excellence and the quality of its research, which is rooted in the excellence of its faculty. Thank you for this opportunity to participate over the last 33 years in the growth, in the stature of the finest scientific institution in the world: Caltech."

Born in Los Angeles, Bren earned a business administration and economics degree from the University of Washington. He served for three years as a U.S. Marine Corps officer. In 1963, Bren joined the Mission Viejo Company as president and began the master planning and development of the 11,000-acre community of Mission Viejo, California. In 1967, Bren sold his interest in the Mission Viejo Company to focus on statewide building, including the Irvine Ranch. In 1977, he joined a group of investors to purchase the Irvine Company. In 1983, Bren was elected chairman of the board, and he became principal shareholder in 1996.

Rolf H. Sabersky, Caltech professor of mechanical engineering, emeritus, passed away on October 24, 2016, at the age of 96. 

Born on October 20, 1920, in Berlin, German, Sabersky earned his bachelor's, master's, and PhD degrees in mechanical engineering from Caltech in 1942, 1943, and 1949, respectively. He joined the Caltech faculty as an assistant professor in 1949, became associate professor in 1955, and was named professor in 1961. He retired in 1988.

Sabersky made pioneering contributions to our understanding of boiling heat transfer, free convection, granular flows, and indoor air quality. He taught courses in thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, and heat transfer.

Throughout his career, Sabersky worked with numerous luminaries, including Theodore von Kármán at Aerojet. James Van Allan sought his expertise for the development of the Ajax and Bumblebee rocket programs. 

At Caltech, Sabersky was renowned for his commitment to education, mentoring, and promoting diversity. He was the author of two popular textbooks, Elements of Engineering Thermodynamics, and Fluid Flow: A First Course in Fluid Mechanics, which he coauthored with Caltech's Allan Acosta, the Richard L. and Dorothy M. Hayman Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Emeritus. He received the Heat Transfer Memorial Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1977.

Sabersky was preceded in death by his wife of 70 years, Bettina, and is survived by his two daughters, Carol and Sandy, and their families.

A longer obituary will be posted at a later date.

Throughout her career as a Wall Street executive, Caltech trustee Deborah McWhinney has helped foster excellence in others by serving as a mentor and an advocate for leadership development. With her $1 million gift to support students at Caltech, McWhinney is once again focused on helping tomorrow's leaders.

Read more on the Caltech campaign website.

On Friday, November 11, the Institute celebrated Veterans Day with a special barbecue lunch on Beckman Mall honoring the service and contributions of veterans at Caltech, JPL, and across the nation.

About 200 people attended the event, which began with a color guard presentation. The event featured remarks by President Thomas F. Rosenbaum and a keynote speech by Colonel Nancy Sumner, California Air National Guard, USAF Ret. (pictured).

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Rolf Sabersky, professor of mechanical engineering, emeritus, died on October 24. He was 96 years old.

Sabersky made pioneering contributions to our understanding of boiling heat transfer, free convection, granular flows, and indoor air quality. He taught courses in thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, and heat transfer.

Sabersky earned his bachelor's, master's, and PhD degrees in mechanical engineering from Caltech in 1942, 1943, and 1949, respectively. He joined the faculty of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science (EAS) as an assistant professor in 1949, became associate professor in 1955, and was named professor in 1961. He retired in 1988.

He was preceded in death by his wife of 70 years, Bettina, who died five months before his passing. Friends and family describe Sabersky as a devoted family man with a gentle manner and a wry sense of humor; colleagues note that he was a gifted teacher and a mentor to students and junior faculty members alike.  

"Rolf was just a wonderful person who wanted me to succeed and for my colleagues to succeed," says Melany Hunt, Dotty and Dick Hayman Professor of Mechanical Engineering, who first met Sabersky when she joined Caltech as an assistant professor in 1988.  

Born on October 20, 1920, in Berlin, Sabersky attended the Französisches Gymnasium, a French high school founded by the Huguenots in 1689, until he was 17 years old. A few months after his graduation in the spring of 1938, he and his family, who were devoted Jews, emigrated to the United States from Germany.

"We didn't realize how late it was," Sabersky said in a 1990 interview at Caltech. "Soon thereafter, November '38, the so-called Kristallnacht took place."

Sabersky, along with his parents, brother, and sister, stopped first in Switzerland, then went to Los Angeles, where Sabersky had been accepted as a student at Caltech. There, he became a member of Dabney House. "From '39 on, I've been here ever since, every day," he said in the 1990 interview. "Pretty much every day of my life, I've been on campus since that day."

The bombing of Pearl Harbor during his senior year brought the war to the United States, and suddenly Sabersky—who was not yet a citizen—was legally an "enemy alien." A group of students organized to guard the campus, which housed several war-related projects. Sabersky joined the group but, because of his citizenship status, he was deemed unable to participate as a guard. Instead, he volunteered as the group's secretary until the student-run group was replaced by professional guards. Later, as a graduate student, Sabersky joined the campus's civil defense unit as a member of the fire brigade, alongside J. E. Wallace Sterling, who would go on to become the director of the Huntington Library and Art Gallery and then the president of Stanford University.

After earning his master's degree, Sabersky took his one professional turn outside of academia, accepting a job offer from Aerojet, a rocket and missile propulsion manufacturing company that had been founded by Theodore von Kármán in 1942. At the time, von Kármán was the director of what was then called the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratories of the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT), and so the nascent company—which resided in an automobile agency near campus that had been left vacant by the war—included many faculty and students from the Institute. At Aerojet, Sabersky worked on the development of sustained-duration liquid-rocket engines, building personal and professional connections that would last for the rest of his career. Decades later, he met with former Aerojet colleagues for regular lunches at the Athenaeum.

Sabersky met his future wife, Bettina Schuster, while visiting his sister Lore at the University of California, Berkeley, where Bettina was a graduate student studying romance languages. Like Sabersky, Bettina had been born in Germany but ended up in California after fleeing the Nazis.

In 1946, with the war over, the newly married Sabersky returned to Caltech and resumed his studies. In 1949, he received a PhD in mechanical engineering for his work on axial flow compressors, which use spinning airfoils to continuously pressurize gases. The compressors are still used today in jet engines.

Over his career, Sabersky made pioneering contributions to our understanding of boiling heat transfer, free convection, granular flows, and indoor air quality—work for which he received the Heat Transfer Memorial Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1977. In particular, his research focused on what he described as "funny fluids"—materials such as ketchup, which have complicated flow characteristics that manufacturers are keen to understand. He was the author of two popular textbooks, Elements of Engineering Thermodynamics, and Fluid Flow: A First Course in Fluid Mechanics, which he coauthored with Allan Acosta, Richard L. and Dorothy M. Hayman Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Emeritus.

Sabersky taught courses in thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, and heat transfer for nearly four decades at Caltech, and was beloved by his students—in 2011, former students organized a dinner in his honor. He was equally appreciative of them and of Caltech, Hunt says. "He was ever grateful to Caltech for everything that Caltech had done for him, and he wanted to pass that along."

Sabersky is survived by his two daughters, Carol and Sandy, and their families.

Caltech senior trustee Charles Trimble (BS '63, MS '64), founder and former chief executive officer of Trimble Navigation, Ltd., is the 2016 recipient of the International von Kármán Wings Award. The honor—administered by the Aerospace Historical Society and the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories of the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT)—recognizes Trimble's "visionary leadership contributions to the aerospace industry, and distinguished service to the nation's defense and aerospace programs," according to the award announcement.

Through the launch of Trimble in 1978, Charles Trimble led the industry in developing commercial equipment that utilizes the Global Positioning System (GPS). By the late '90s, the company was a leading worldwide supplier of GPS equipment. Since leaving Trimble in 1998, he has mentored several entrepreneurs and served on the boards of directors for public and private companies. He also sits on the Caltech Board of Trustees.

"GPS as an information technology has been a disruptive force in changing the way people live and work. The space-based infrastructure that has made this possible is a shining example of this country's aerospace achievements," Trimble says. "I am honored and humbled to be associated with aerospace legends such as William Pickering, Si Ramo, Buzz Aldrin, Dan Goldin, Charles Elachi, and many others."

Mory Gharib, the Hans W. Liepmann Professor of Aeronautics and Bioinspired Engineering at Caltech, director of GALCIT, and chair of the Aerospace Historical Society presented the award at a private banquet at the Athenaeum on November 17. 

"In addition to his pioneering contributions to GPS commercialization, Charlie has had a big impact on Caltech and JPL," Gharib says. "As an alumnus and trustee, he deeply understands the needs of Caltech and serves the community with dedication and insight."

Trimble is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including Inc. magazine's Entrepreneur of the Year in 1991, the American Electronics Association Medal of Achievement in 2000, the NASA Public Service Medal in 2001 and 2004, and the Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award in 1995. In 1994, he received the Piper General Aviation Award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics for pioneering the manufacture and application of affordable GPS. 

Also at the banquet, Gharib presented the Shirley Thomas Academic Scholarship to Caltech graduate student Yuchen Wei from the lab of Sergio Pellegrino, the Joyce and Kent Kresa Professor of Aeronautics and professor of civil engineering; Jet Propulsion Laboratory Senior Research Scientist; and co-director of the Space-Based Solar Power Project. Wei is contributing to the hardware and software development of an autonomously assembled and reconfigurable space telescope design. In a written statement read by Gharib at the banquet, Pellegrino described Wei as "a tireless and passionate researcher who is making the most of his time at GALCIT."

Every year since 2010, the Shirley Thomas Academic Scholarship has been presented to a student in aerospace, aeronautics, or a related program who demonstrates promise for continued contribution to the field. Thomas, the founder of the Aerospace Historical Society, was an actress, writer, producer, and professor who became a prominent figure in the early days of the space program. She authored more than 15 books, including an eight-volume series on astronauts titled Men of Space.

This was the 32nd annual International von Kármán Wings Award ceremony. Since its inception in 1985, the Aerospace Society has honored luminaries such as astronaut Buzz Aldrin (1994), science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke (2001), private spaceflight pioneer Burt Rutan (2005), and, of course, Theodore von Kármán (posthumously, 1991).

Three Caltech scientists have been elected as Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for their "scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications," according to an AAAS press release.

Albert Lazzarini is the deputy director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) Laboratory at Caltech. The AAAS recognized Lazzarini for over 20 years of LIGO leadership. LIGO made the first-ever detection of gravitational waves arriving at Earth in September 2015.

Jay Marx is the senior program advisor for LIGO Caltech and former executive director of LIGO (2006–2011). The AAAS noted Marx's leadership of LIGO as well as his involvement with the SLAC PEP-4 detector, which studies electron-positron collisions; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Advanced Light Source, a synchrotron facility that studies beams of X-rays; and Brookhaven National Laboratory's STAR detector, which tracks particles produced by ion collisions.

Michael Elowitz is a professor of biology and bioengineering, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, and executive officer for biological engineering. The AAAS recognized his contributions to the field of synthetic biology, particularly his work on the design of genetic circuits in bacteria and eukaryotes and on the role of stochastic "noise" in living cells.

Six Caltech alumni were also named as Fellows: John Arrington (MS '92, PhD '98), Patrick Dussault (PhD '87), David Eaton (PhD '72), Sidney Leibovich (BS '61), Ardem Patapoutian (PhD '96), and Gary Stormo (BS '72).

The AAAS is the world's largest general scientific society. This year, the AAAS awarded the distinction of Fellow to 391 of its members. New Fellows will be honored during the 2017 AAAS Annual Meeting in February.

Thanks to a gift from the class of 2016, there are now charging stations at nine strategic locations on campus where users can plug in their phones and laptops.

Emblazoned with a cartoon beaver offering power-ups "Free of Charge" to all members of the Caltech community and visitors, the stations come as either a stand-up version, which includes charging cables fitting most phones and tablets, or a smaller tabletop version that also offers standard electrical outlets for laptops.

The stations are located inside Chandler Café as well as around other high-traffic areas such as the Red Door Café, Winnett Lounge, and Baxter Auditorium. Additional stations are available at the Millikan Library 9th floor study area, the Caltech Center for Diversity, the Sherman Fairchild Library, and the Office of Undergraduate Admissions.

The critically acclaimed television series The Mechanical Universe… And Beyond, created at Caltech and broadcast on PBS from 1985-86, is now available in its entirety on YouTube thanks to the efforts of Caltech's Institute's Information Science and Technology initiative.

The series was based on the Physics 1a and 1b courses developed by David Goodstein, the Frank J. Gilloon Distinguished Teaching and Service Professor and Professor of Physics and Applied Physics, Emeritus. It covers topics spanning the scientific revolution begun by Copernicus through quantum theory.

Each episode opens and closes with Goodstein lecturing to his freshman physics class in 201 E. Bridge, providing philosophical, historical, and often humorous insight into the day's topic. The show also contains hundreds of computer animation segments, created by JPL computer graphics engineer James F. Blinn, as the primary tool of instruction. Dynamic location footage and historical re-creations are also used to stress the fact that science is a human endeavor.

Mathieu Desbrun, the John W. and Herberta M. Miles Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, says Caltech was eager to feature the course on its YouTube site because it has been used for decades around the world as a teaching aid, underscoring one of the ways the Institute continues to have an impact disproportionate to its size.

Although the series was designed as a college-level course, "thousands of high school teachers across the US came to depend on it for instructional and inspirational use," Goodstein says. "The level of instruction in the US was, and remains, abysmally low, and these 52 programs filled a great void."

The show retains its impact and relevance, partly because "Newton's three laws are still the law of the land," he says—as are other subjects addressed in the series such as relativity, electromagnetic theory, and quantum mechanics.

Blinn says the series was designed to be rigorous and engaging and used computer animation in a groundbreaking way to visualize mathematical manipulations. Creators of the series referred to the animation as "algebraic ballet," with terms and visual metaphors dancing around the screen to show operations like cancellation and differentiation. "The availability of technology made it so that the developers of the series could see their ideas realized," he says.

The use of Blinn's computer animations—a rare and expensive technology at the time—made it "legendary," Desbrun says. "The Mechanical Universe is a piece of Caltech history and a source of pride."

The series can be found online at http://bit.ly/2gvNAA3.

Jewel Plummer Cobb, a life member of the Caltech Board of Trustees and president and professor of biology, emerita, of California State University, Fullerton, passed away on January 1, 2017. She was 92 years old.

Cobb was elected to the Caltech Board of Trustees in 1990 and was named a life member in 2005, in which capacity she served until her death. She served as a member of the Audit and Compliance Committee and the Nominating Committee.

Born on January 17, 1924, in Chicago, Illinois, Cobb earned her bachelor's degree from Talladega College in 1944, and her MS and PhD degrees, both in cell physiology, from New York University in 1947 and 1950, respectively. She also held 22 honorary doctorates.

Known for her work in cell physiology, her promotion of the advancement of women in scientific fields, and her activities on behalf of minorities, Cobb published 36 articles regarding the growth, morphology, and genetic expression of normal and cancer pigment cells. In addition, she published a number of articles dealing with the advancement of women and minorities in scientific fields.

Prior to her 1981 appointment as president of California State University, Fullerton, a position she held until 1990, she was dean of Douglass College and professor of biological sciences at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, for five years. Before her Douglass appointment she served as dean of Connecticut College and professor of zoology for seven years, and as professor of biology at Sarah Lawrence College for nine years.

A recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Science Foundation and the Kilby Lifetime Achievement Award, Cobb was a member of the board of fellows of Claremont Graduate University and a trustee of Talladega College. She was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the New York Academy of Sciences, and Sigma Xi.

She is survived by her son, Roy Jonathon Cobb, daughter-in-law, Suzzanne Douglas, and granddaughter, Jordan.

Richard Marsh (BS '43), senior research associate in chemistry, emeritus, at Caltech, passed away on January 3, 2017, at the age of 94.

Marsh, who went by the name Dick, was a crystallographer, and a colleague, mentor, and friend to generations of scientists. His career at Caltech started before World War II, spanned the golden age of structural chemistry led by Caltech's Linus Pauling, and continued to flourish into the 21^st century. Crystallography is an experimental approach for determining in detail the locations of the atoms in a molecule by analyzing how X-rays are scattered from a crystalline sample of that compound.

"Dick was a legendary one-of-a-kind crystallographer who was recognized for his mastery of the field and his rigorous standards. He trained generations of students and postdocs and was widely respected as representing the heart and soul of crystallography," says Doug Rees, the Roscoe Gilkey Dickinson Professor of Chemistry and faculty director of the Molecular Observatory for Macromolecular Crystallography at Caltech.

Marsh was born in Jackson, Michigan, in 1922. He arrived at Caltech as a freshman in 1939, graduating with a degree in applied chemistry in 1943. "He would describe the required technical drawing course that he took with an enthusiasm that presaged his future talents in detailing molecular structure," says Rees.

Although Linus Pauling had established Caltech as a world center for crystallography around this time, Marsh's interest in this area did not begin then. In 1945, after Marsh was discharged from the US Navy in New Orleans, the home of his fiancée Helena Laterriere (whom he married in 1947), he started graduate school at Tulane University. He enrolled in the X-ray crystallography course at H. Sophie Newcomb College, the women's college of Tulane, as it was one of the few available classes with an opening. As reported in an issue of Caltech's Engineering & Science magazine, Marsh said the class changed his life, and that the instructor Rose Mooney inspired him to become a crystallographer. Tulane did not offer a PhD in chemistry, so after this introduction to crystallography, Marsh transferred to UCLA where he received his PhD in 1950 with James McCullough for crystallographic studies of organoselenium compounds, which are molecules with carbon-selenium bonds.

Marsh returned to Caltech in 1950 as a postdoctoral research fellow, working with Pauling on crystallography. He became a research associate in 1973, senior research associate in 1981, and senior research associate, emeritus, in 1990. Marsh was critically involved in many noteworthy structural developments, including work on hydrates, trimesic acid, protonated water clusters, intermetallic compounds, and the detailed geometry of amino acids and peptides. Marsh's structural study of a protein in silk called fibroin culminated in the textbook model for a protein structural feature called the anti-parallel beta sheet. That research still resonates today for its implications in the architecture of amyloid fibril plaques associated with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's.

"Dick Marsh was an exceptionally talented crystallographer whose work had enormous impact on young and old investigators alike," says Harry Gray, Arnold O. Beckman Professor of Chemistry at Caltech. "I learned so much discussing structures with him. I knew that if he couldn't solve a structure, it couldn't be solved!"

A characteristic of Marsh's research was to carefully analyze the errors in a crystal structure determination. Rees recalls that Marsh was particularly upset about the most egregious cases of incorrect structure determinations, often due to erroneous assignments of the underlying arrangements of the constituent molecules in crystals. As Marsh noted in his crystallographic history: "I somehow take such errors personally: they should not happen in MY field of study."

From his office in the Beckman Institute at Caltech, Marsh continued surveying and correcting reported structures for the rest of his life. "The threat to other crystallographers of being publicly 'Marshed' for publishing a problematic structure undoubtedly contributed to increased scrutiny and care that prevented a number of incorrect crystal structures from ever being published," says Rees.

He served as president of the American Crystallographic Association in 1993, and was co-editor of Acta Crystallographica from 1964 to 1971. He was the first recipient in 2004 of the American Crystallographic Association's Kenneth N. Trueblood Award, given for exceptional achievement in computational or chemical crystallography.

Marsh was a research mentor to both students and young faculty. John Bercaw, Caltech's Centennial Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus, recalls approaching Marsh back in 1975 to help solve the structure of a key compound that cleanly generates hydrazine from molecular nitrogen. Bercaw had been informed that solving the compound's crystal structure was not possible. After Bercaw explained to Marsh the major importance of obtaining this crystal structure, Marsh immediately accepted the challenge and devised a method for solving the structure, allowing for further studies of the mechanism of hydrazine formation.

"Dick's inquisitiveness, integrity, compassion, and his intolerance of sloppy thinking and bureaucracy, epitomize the best traditions of Caltech, while highlighting the impact that one person can have on a field and generations of scientists," says Bercaw.

Marsh leaves behind his wife Helena; his four children Susan (Bill Winnie), Chip (Kay), Kirby (Bob Lauderback), and Stephen (Susan); 11 grandchildren and their spouses; and four great-grandchildren.

Caltech's Center for Teaching, Learning, and Outreach (CTLO) will host its second annual TeachWeek program from January 17–23. The event celebrates the impact of teaching, featuring events and discussions with Caltech faculty, alumni, TAs, and staff as well as open classes, workshops, and talks with guest presenters.

TeachWeek, whose theme this year is "Empowering Learning," focuses on Caltech's recent efforts to create an innovative learning environment that changes the world through unique teaching techniques. "Year round, Caltech faculty and teaching assistants are investing time and energy in teaching not for its own sake, but to empower students to learn and do more—to go further with their passion, research, and creativity," says CTLO director Cassandra Horii. "That's where our theme, empowering learning, comes from; during TeachWeek, you get a glimpse of the variety of ways Caltech is empowering learning today, as well as new ways we might do so in the coming years."

Caltech faculty, teaching assistants, and others are featured in the opening panel, titled "Empowering Learning through Teaching at Caltech and Beyond," and the closing event, "Ignite Your Teaching: Ideas and Practices You Can Use," with introductory remarks by Caltech president Thomas Rosenbaum.

Guest presenters will include Mary-Ann Winkelmes, a senior fellow of the Association of American Colleges and Universities from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who will give the keynote talk about and lead a workshop in "Teaching with Transparency: Empowering Equitable Learning." In addition, John Pollard, associate professor of practice in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Arizona and co-author of the nationally recognized Chemical Thinking curriculum and book, will present a talk titled "Questioning Why and How We Gather Students Together: Empowering Changes in Curricula and Teaching."

The event is open to the entire Caltech community. Visitor seats in open classes may be limited due to space and activities; you can reserve space online as well as get more information about the week's slate of activities at teachweek.caltech.edu.