Caltech is a world-renowned research and education institute. A purposely small, close-knit, and collaborative community, Caltech empowers the brightest minds to address fundamental scientific questions, develop cutting-edge technologies, and expand the horizons of human knowledge.
The Caltech community embraces an ethos of shared knowledge and believes that the exchange of ideas across diverse backgrounds and perspectives is essential to the advancement of science, engineering, and innovation that benefits society. Students have unparalleled access to top-class researchers and state-of-the-art instrumentation, and more than 90 percent of undergraduates participate in research, including at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which Caltech founded and has managed for NASA since the agency’s inception.
Caltech’s unique blend of focus, interdisciplinary collaboration, and unfettered curiosity put the Institute on the front lines of research in areas such as quantum science and engineering, astronomy, advanced computing and artificial intelligence, Earth science and sustainability, and biology and health. Institute faculty, alumni, and postdoctoral scholars have earned a total of 49 Nobel Prizes for discoveries including the development of artificial neural networks, the first detection of ripples in space-time, and directed evolution.
In addition to managing JPL, a leader in robotic space exploration, Caltech operates a global network of astronomical observatories including the Palomar and W. M. Keck observatories. The Institute also co-founded and co-manages LIGO, a national facility for gravitational-wave research.
Caltech has one of the nation’s lowest student-to-faculty ratios, with some 300 professorial faculty members offering a rigorous curriculum and access to varied learning opportunities to approximately 1,000 undergraduates and 1,400 graduate students.
Caltech’s 26,000-plus living alumni represent the Institute all over the world and are eminent in fields ranging from engineering and science, to law, medicine, academia, entrepreneurship, and more.
Caltech’s structure comprises six academic divisions plus JPL. The divisions are: the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering (BBE); the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering (CCE); the Division of Engineering and Applied Science (EAS); the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS); the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS); and the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA).
Caltech is an independent, privately supported institution with a 124-acre campus located in Pasadena, California.