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.
Caltech leads 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 47 Nobel Prizes for discoveries including the development of artificial neural networks, the first detection of ripples in space-time, and directed evolution.
The Institute also founded and manages the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a leader in robotic space exploration, for NASA; operates a global network of astronomical observatories including the Palomar and W. M. Keck observatories; and 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 is an independent, privately supported institution with a 124-acre campus located in Pasadena, California.