October 29, 2026 - The Inauguration of President Ray Jayawardhana
Peter Dervan: Dear Trustees, faculty, students, postdocs, staff and friends,
Jackie and I never expected to be on stage today at the Inauguration of Caltech's next president, Ray Jayawardhana. We had lunch a few weeks ago with Ray at the Athenaeum. The hour flew by as we reflected on our careers at Caltech. We shared with Ray what we believed was the essence of Caltech culture and success. It was clear that Ray gets Caltech and what makes it so special. He is deeply committed to preserving that culture.
How does a small institution in Pasadena have such a profound impact on the world? It is somewhat counterintuitive. "Small" would argue we don't scale for impact like larger universities. What is the secret? I will recall in my remarks a few snapshots from my journey from 1973 to 2020. Perhaps I can weave from these stories a few threads to reveal a fabric that supports Caltech's innovative ecosystem.
Let me take you back in time 50 years. In 1975, I was 30 years old, teaching and doing research in the field of my PhD thesis, physical organic chemistry—how chemical bonds are made and broken. It was a mature field, so I decided at my young age that I needed to pivot, to change research directions. I believed that synthetic organic chemists should design and build molecules that modulate biological systems (i.e., build molecules with properties and function). You may not believe this—particularly for the young students here that weren't born 50 years ago. At the time there was a deep chasm between the cultures of chemistry and biology—unthinkable today. In the words of Nobel Laureate Arthur Kornberg, organic chemists would rather understand the arrangement of atoms in the pigment of a butterfly—called natural products—than study messy biology and the molecules of life: nucleic acids, proteins, carbohydrates. My new direction might be considered a career-ending move. Yet, I had the support of my Caltech colleagues. Remarkably, I also had the personal support of a Trustee, Arnold Beckman—we stand on the Beckman Mall today, Beckman Building—a Caltech alumnus who was one of Caltech's early entrepreneurs. You'll all recall Arnold got his PhD in chemistry in 1928, invented the PH meter, and went on to found one of the first start-ups from Caltech.
There are two threads here. This is the secret sauce: It is easy at Caltech, even as an assistant professor, to change fields to a new frontier. In addition, there was deep Trustee involvement in terms of resources and funds to completely equip my chemistry lab for biological experiments. Every day I walk on this campus, I feel Arnold Beckman's presence.
In making the case for the importance of fundamental research, one must appreciate the long timelines from breakthrough discovery to societal impact. This may be my most important take-home lesson today. Today, we read about the profound impact of artificial intelligence on our lives. So let me once more take you back in time when I lived my story. Back in 1982, my colleague in chemistry at Caltech, John Hopfield, a physics professor, had recently moved from Princeton to Caltech. Guess what? What John wanted to do in this move to Caltech was he wanted to change his research direction—Does that sound familiar?––and apply physics thinking to problems in biology. For example: How does the brain form and retrieve memories? He wrote a single-author paper in PNAS in 1982 suggesting equations that might be a model for enabling machine learning with artificial neural networks. As you know he received the Nobel Prize at age 91 a few years ago for his foundational contributions. The timeline from John's paper in '82 to now is 40 years. Of course, there are enormous contributions in that timeline by others in terms of data centers, chip technology, and everything else. It's extraordinary, but there was a match 40 years ago.
Another story: In 1994, I was CCE chair, and at the monthly meeting of the division chairs we were discussing research led by Kip Thorne. I saw Kip's image on the screen. So Kip, I hope I get this right or I'm in big trouble. This was the mid '90s now, so we were discussing Kip's research program, which goes back to 1976, where they were interested in building laser interferometers to measure Einstein's gravitational waves. For 20 years––'76 to '94––they were building prototypes. In the room with the six division chairs, we were saying, "Whoa, now it's time to build a full observatory." This is going to cost several hundred million dollars, likely. The timeline was uncertain, and here's the punchline: It may not work. Because detection technology at the time was still off by a factor of 1,000 in sensitivity. Talk about courage and curiosity. At Kip Thorne's Commencement address to Caltech students last year, he gave some fabulous advice, which resonated with me, so I'm going to repeat it. One line, so everybody take notes: Allocate 15 percent of your time to peripheral vision, be on the lookout for opportunities, and maintain cautious optimism.
Of course, when one research group at Caltech innovates at the fundamental level, a door is cracked open and potentially creates a new research direction. But here's the key: The benefits of fundamental discovery unfold across generations. We pay it forward for our children. It's important that we must sustain the work long before we can see its full consequences. In that timeline, and if that's a pipeline, there is that one investigator or that one group, and then thousands upon thousands contribute to that and build a pipeline for the benefit of society.
From the Caltech-JPL innovation ecosystem, fundamental breakthroughs drove NMR [nuclear magnetic resonance], semiconductor electronics, the biotech revolution, satellite global positioning, personal computers, the internet, the iPhone, and—more recently—mRNA vaccines. This was a return on taxpayer's investment—we the people—underpinning decades of American prosperity, security, and global leadership.
In summary, for Jackie and me, it has been an extraordinary gift to be members of the Caltech faculty. Caltech is about people, like Kip Thorne and John Hopfield, who had the courage to embrace big ideas.
Jacqueline Barton: So what, to me, is the secret sauce that makes Caltech special? It's the students and postdocs. It's the people in these buildings, working day and night, curious and committed to learning new things about the way the world works.
It's the undergraduates, just about all of whom, remarkably, carry out research while they're here, making their first discoveries of something new that hadn't been seen before.
And the graduate students, focusing on a project, a hard project, where they will use new tools and learn new perspectives, likely hitting a wall during the course of their studies—everybody does—and then figuring it out as they begin to see the forest, not just the trees, and they become full-fledged scientists and engineers.
It's the postdocs, likely coming to Caltech from somewhere else, hopefully learning new disciplines, new tools and ideas, and through their apprenticeship at Caltech, preparing to become independent scientists. They then go off to academia, to industry, starting their own careers, maybe starting new companies and creating new jobs, certainly mentoring the next generation.
I'm proud to say between the two of us, Peter and myself, we've trained several hundred students and postdocs. And then when you think about whom they have trained, our scientific grandchildren, and maybe their scientific children, the number gets very large.
These students all share something. It's a commitment to discover, a strong and deep curiosity. It's a boldness to uncover something new about the world around us. That's what makes Caltech special.
I saw this boldness many times in my lab with my students. I can think especially about some of my collaborations with other Caltech groups. We were looking at electron transfer through the DNA base pairs, the steps of the DNA double helix. We wanted to know how fast electrons travel through the DNA base pair stack. What's the timescale for the reaction through the DNA helix? We knew it was fast, but how fast? For that, we teamed up with my chemistry colleague Ahmed Zewail. He and his group taught us about femtosecond spectroscopy. We taught his group a little about DNA and about doing experiments in water. But after a few months, we were all working together, learning about DNA base pair motions on the picosecond timescale, learning of the synchrony in motion necessary to effect electron transfer through DNA.
And then perhaps the other extreme is a more recent collaboration with my colleague in BBE, Dianne Newman, an outstanding microbiologist. With her group, we first explored DNA signaling through electron transfer within the cell, using mutational analysis to probe DNA signaling by proteins that repair DNA. But then we explored DNA electron transfer among cells in a biofilm, where the extracellular DNA, which is a large component of a biofilm, might be used for long-range signaling.
What do these disparate collaborations have in common? It is that curiosity and commitment. How our research groups learned from each other, new tools, new perspectives, and how frankly they showed courage in constantly asking new questions in realms where they had little idea what they would find.
That is what is special about this place—about Caltech.
In fact, over lunch with Ray, Peter and I recognized that same spirit in him. Ray brings to Caltech an eagerness to learn from others and a readiness to act on bold ideas and take risks that open the way to discovery.
Dervan: Jackie and I are confident that Ray will sustain the central importance of fundamental discovery at Caltech. He has the curiosity, the spirit, and the courage to lead us forward. He will need our total support as he navigates a changing environment regarding relationships between society, universities, and government.
Barton: So, to the Trustees, to our faculty colleagues, to the students, the postdocs, the staff, to our colleagues at JPL, let us all partner together to help Ray to preserve and nurture what is so special about Caltech, so that we may ask still more bold questions and uncover new ideas.
Dervan: Congratulations, Ray!
Barton: We're all with you!