California Institute of Technology
California Institute of Technology
The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) was founded in 1891 and is a private university located in Pasadena, California (Pasadena, CA). The institution is not only the founder and current manager of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) but also contributes significantly to U.S. science and applied science policies.Caltech has six academic divisions, focusing primarily on science and engineering disciplines, with substantial annual research funding. Caltech students have the highest rate of obtaining doctoral degrees in the U.S. Besides undergraduate programs, Caltech offers top-tier graduate programs in engineering, biology, chemistry, computer engineering, earth sciences, mathematics, and physics, attracting talent from around the globe.The university participates in numerous large-scale research projects and receives funding from organizations like NASA, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). A longstanding tradition between Caltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) involves a rivalry of playful pranks, known as the "Caltech-MIT rivalry," where students challenge each other’s intelligence, adaptability, and creativity through cross-country pranks on each other’s campuses.Caltech's athletic teams, known as the "Caltech Beavers," perform notably in the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SCIAC), which the school co-founded, and compete in the NCAA against athletes from UCLA, USC, UCSD, and Stanford University.Notable alumni include 34 Nobel laureates, the founder of Hotmail, co-founder of Intel, and the "Father of Silicon Valley," William Shockley, who pioneered the use of silicon instead of germanium as a semiconductor material, leading to the term "Silicon Valley" to describe the burgeoning semiconductor industry of the time.