News & Events

01-23-17

Anatol Roshko (MS '47, PhD '52), Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics, Emeritus, at Caltech, passed away on January 23, 2017. Known for his research in several areas of gas dynamics and fluid mechanics, Professor Roshko made contributions to problems of separated flow, bluff-body aerodynamics, shock-wave boundary-layer interactions, shock-tube technology, and the structure of turbulent shear flows. With pioneering aerodynamics researcher Hans Liepmann, he coauthored the widely used textbook Elements of Gasdynamics, published in 1956. [Caltech story]

Tags: research highlights GALCIT EAS history Anatol Roshko

12-15-16

Morteza Gharib, Hans W. Liepmann Professor of Aeronautics and Bioinspired Engineering; Director, Graduate Aerospace Laboratories, has received the 2016 Rotary Humanitarian STAR Award from the Rotary Club of Sierra Madre. The award honors outstanding humanitarian achievements in science and technology.

Tags: honors GALCIT MedE Morteza Gharib

12-13-16

The Resnick Sustainability Institute and the Dow Chemical Company have awarded a number of exceptional young scientists and engineers with the Sustainability Innovation Student Challenge Award (SISCA) for outstanding student achievement in sustainability innovation. Graduate students Jinglin Huang and Cong Wang from Professor Gharib’s lab are this year’s runners up for progress in developing a superhydrophobic surface out of carbon nanotubes that will improve the efficiency of solar powered seawater desalination systems. 

Tags: honors GALCIT Morteza Gharib Jinglin Huang Cong Wang

11-18-16

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. He was recognized for his visionary leadership contributions to the aerospace industry, and distinguished service to the nation's defense and aerospace programs. "In addition to his pioneering contributions to GPS commercialization, Charlie has had a big impact on Caltech and JPL," Professor Gharib stated. "As an alumnus and trustee, he deeply understands the needs of Caltech and serves the community with dedication and insight." [Caltech story]

Tags: honors GALCIT CMS ESE Morteza Gharib Charles Trimble

10-11-16

Beverley McKeon, Professor of Aeronautics and Associate Director of the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories, has been elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) “for experimental and theoretical contributions to advancing the understanding of wall turbulence and for elegant interdisciplinary approaches to modeling and flow manipulation.” [APS Fellow Archive]

Tags: honors GALCIT Beverley McKeon fluid dynamics

09-29-16

A symposium was organized at Brown University on September 16-17, 2016 to celebrate the technical contributions of Professor Ares Rosakis on the occasion of his 60th birthday. The symposium was chaired by Professors Pradeep Guduru, Huajian Gao, and G. Ravichandran. It brought together distinguished engineers and scientists from multiple disciplines to discussion research frontiers relating to the mechanics of materials across nano to geological time and length scales. [Symposium program] [Photos]

Tags: research highlights Guruswami Ravichandran Ares Rosakis Pradeep Guduru Huajian Gao

09-28-16

Professor Sergio Pellegrino and colleagues including Professor Joel Burdick, are proposing a space observatory with a 100 meters diameter primary mirror. Their design calls for the use of more than 300 deployable truss modules that could be unfolded to form a scaffolding upon which a commensurate number of small mirror plates could be placed to create a large segmented mirror. In this concept, a spider-like, six-armed "hexbot" would assemble the trusswork and then crawl across the structure to build the mirror atop it. [Caltech story]

Tags: research highlights GALCIT MCE Sergio Pellegrino Joel Burdick

09-12-16

More than 70 students, faculty, friends, and alums from GALCIT and MCE attended a Caltech Mechanics Reception during the 2016 International Conference on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, which was held in Montreal on August 23, 2016. Attendees ranged from current students to a 1965 Mechanical Engineering undergraduate. All appreciate the opportunity to reconnect with the extended Caltech mechanics family.

Tags: GALCIT MCE alumni

09-07-16

Michael Watkins, Director of JPL, has joined the GALCIT faculty as Professor of Aerospace and Geophysics. Professor Watkins holds bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. degrees in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. He has published in both engineering and science, contributed more than 100 conference presentations, and serves or served on the boards of numerous international scientific and engineering societies. In addition, he has taught estimation, filtering theory and system engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and at Caltech. [Caltech announcement]

Tags: GALCIT Michael Watkins

08-08-16

Professors Dennis M. Kochmann and Chiara Daraio along with colleagues from Harvard have designed and created mechanical chains made of soft matter that can transmit signals across long distances. Because they are flexible, the circuits could be used in machines such as soft robots or lightweight aircraft constructed from pliable, nonmetallic materials. "Engineers tend to shy away from instability. "Though there are many applications, the fundamental principles that we explore are most exciting to me," Kochmann says. "These nonlinear systems show very similar behavior to materials at the atomic scale but these are difficult to access experimentally or computationally. Now we have built a simple macroscale analogue that mimics how they behave." [Caltech story]

Tags: research highlights Chiara Daraio GALCIT MCE Dennis Kochmann