NASA’s next flagship mission, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, is designed to research the areas of dark energy, exoplanets, and infrared astronomy. The Coronagraph Instrument on the telescope will allow astronomers to directly image planets in orbit around host stars by reducing the glare from the host star. However, with photons of light constantly…

Author: Taylor CasonUniversity of California, Los AngelesMentors: Professor Andrew Thompson, Mar Flexas, and Lily DoveResnick Sustainability Institute, California Institute of TechnologyEditor: Bertha Mireles Introduction The ocean plays a vital role in the climate system because of its ability to store up to sixty times the carbon present in the atmosphere, exhibiting an exchange between the…

Proteins are the molecules of life, essential for a wide range of functions from protecting the body from viruses to building the structures of all living things. Protein engineering has been used to repurpose these machines, and proteins can be optimized for new, valuable functions for technological, scientific, and medical applications. New approaches to protein…

Interviewer: Audrey DeVault Biography Dr. Joseph Falson joined Caltech’s faculty in 2019 as a visiting associate with the Department of Applied Physics and Materials Science, and became an Assistant Professor of Materials Science in 2020. His research focuses on the synthesis and characterization of quantum materials that display emergent functionalities. Dr. Falson received his B.S…

Author: Patryk KozlowskiMentor: Garnet K. Chan and Yang GaoEditor: Hannah X. Chen Introduction Due to the imminent crisis of climate change, developing sustainable methods for fuel and chemical production has become more important than ever. A significant step towards progress comes from the electrochemistry processes which use renewable energy to convert molecules from the atmosphere…