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Welcome to
Caltech Electrical Engineering

EE at Caltech has a century-long record of excellence, innovation and training many distinguished leaders in the field. As a discipline, EE has had a huge impact on the technologies that define modern-day life and society. EE at Caltech emphasizes both the fundamentals of electronics and systems, as well as acknowledging the multi-disciplinary nature of the field. Closely allied with Computation and Neural Systems, Applied Physics, Bioengineering, Computer Science, and Control and Dynamical System, it offers students the opportunity for study and research, both theoretical and experimental, in a wide variety of subjects, including wireless systems, quantum electronics, modern optics, lasers and guided waves, solid-state materials and devices, bio-optics and bio-electronics, power and energy systems, control theory, learning systems, computational finance, signal processing, data compression, communications, parallel and distributed computing, fault-tolerant computing, and computational vision.

Substantial experimental laboratory facilities, housed mainly in the Moore Laboratory of Engineering, are associated with each of these research fields.

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EE celebrated 100 years!
Check out videos and slide show from the event.

bullet The Charles Wilts Prize is awarded every year to one EE graduate student for outstanding independent research in Electrical Engineering leading to a PhD. View a list of recipients.
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The first Caltech EE student to send the correct answer receives a $25 gift certificate for The Red Door. Send your answers to ee-puzzler@caltech.edu

Puzzle #1
Consider an infinite grid of 1-Ω resistors. Let’s call the dimension of the grid n, where a 1-dimensional grid would be a line of resistors connected end-to-end, a 2-dimensional grid would be a rectangular array of resistors, where each resistor is connected at each end to three other resistors, a 3-dimensional grid would be a cubic lattice where each resistor is connected at end to five resistors, and so on.

What is the resistance that you would measure across a resistor, as a function on n? For the n = 1, it is just 1 Ω, but for higher n, the grid gives a parallel component that reduces the resistance that you would measure.

Hint: superposition

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In the News

Mohammad Amin Khajehnejad and Ching-Chih Weng are the winners of this year’s Charles Wilts Prize. The Charles Wilts Prize is awarded every year to one EE graduate student for outstanding independent research in electrical engineering leading to a PhD. 06.15.12

Applied Physics graduate student, Peter Hung, along with Electrical Engineering undergraduate students Julie Jester, Jeff Sherman, and Sean Keenan, worked with a team of engineering students from across the country to create a one-of-a-kind machine for sharing a Coke. [Read More] 06.15.12

Michelle Effros, Professor of Electrical Michelle EffrosEngineering, and information theorist colleagues have begun to tackle the difficult problem of calculating capacities for large communication networks such as the internet and mobile phone networks. In two recent publications, they introduce techniques useful for improving the performance of current communication networks and for designing the networks of the future. By demonstrating where current technology falls short of what’s possible, these techniques provide a new tool for strategically guiding research and development. [Read the Publications] 06.04.12

Pietro Perona, Allen E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering, Pietro Perona and colleagues including graduate student, Peter Welinder, have been selected for the Innovation Corps (i-Corps) program of the National Science Foundation (NSF). The aim of the i-Corps program, which was highlighted by the NSF Director at a recent Wouk Lecture, is to guide promising research with commercial potential out of university laboratories. The winning Caltech proposal is entitled “Combining Machine Vision and Crowdsourcing for Convenient and Accurate Image Annotation.” The team has proposed to combine the complementary strengths of human annotators and machines into a hybrid system that would annotate a large body of images which would be a valuable in scientific, medical, as well as many commercial applications. [Video of Wouk Lecture] 04.13.12

Hardy C. Martel, Professor of Electrical Hardy MartelEngineering, emeritus, passed away on March 29 at his home in Altadena. He was 85. “He was one of the first at Caltech to do research on information science and communications technology,” says Roy Gould, the Simon Ramo Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, a lifelong friend and colleague of Martel. “His strength was in his basic, intuitive grasp of ideas and how things worked.” [Caltech Feature]

Yaser S. Abu-Mostafa, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, will be Yaser S. Abu-Mostafadelivering lectures for his Learning From Data class live on Caltech’s Ustream channel beginning April 3, 2012.”The idea is that if people in the furthest reaches of the world want to learn the material and have the discipline to go through it, we are giving them the opportunity to experience this course in real time,” Abu-Mostafa says. “We will be interested to see how this experiment goes.” [Caltech Feature] 03.30.12

Electrical Engineering alumni Mark H. Kryder (MS ’66, PhD ’70), and Simon Ramo (PhD ’36) are to receive the Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award, which is the highest honor the Institute bestows upon its graduates. [Caltech Feature] [EE Centennial Video of Kryder] [Past Recipients] 03.19.12

Third place in the 2012 Intellectual Ventures Invention Competition and $10,000 went to senior Alexander Hu and graduate students Steven Bowers, Kaushik Dasgupta, and Kaushik Sengupta. Drawing inspiration from the biological world and the ability of living things to heal wounds, they designed a circuit with its own fully integrated system for self-healing. This group was mentored by Ali Hajimiri, Thomas G. Myers Professor of Electrical Engineering. [Caltech Feature] 03.16.12

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Carver Mead, Gordon and Betty Moore Carver MeadProfessor of Engineering and Applied Science, Emeritus, has been awarded the Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category of Information and Communication Technologies. He was recognized for being “the most influential thinker and pioneer” of the silicon age and for enabling “the development of the billion-transistor processors that drive the electronic devices—for example, in laptops, tablets, smartphones, DVD players—ubiquitous in our daily lives.” [BBVA Release]

Hyuck Choo, Dennis Kochmann, and Austin Minnich focus on quite differentchallenges, but they all home in on the nanoscale. “Caltech and EAS take pride in lowering the barriers between disciplines to create collaborative environments for researchers such as Hyuck, Dennis, and Austin to work on a variety of topics including understanding and predicting behavior of materials at the nanoscale, which already is an area of strength within EAS,” says Ares Rosakis, Theodore von Karman Professor of Aeronautics and Professor of Mechanical Engineering; Chair, Division of Engineering and Applied Science. [Caltech Feature]

P. P. Vaidyanathan, Professor of P.P. VaidyanathanElectrical Engineering, has been selected to receive the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Signal Processing Society Education Award. This award honors educators who have made pioneering and significant contributions to signal processing education. Nominees are judged by a career of meritorious achievement in signal processing education as exemplified by writing of scholarly books and texts, course materials, and papers on education; inspirational and innovative teaching; creativity in the development of new curricula and methodology. [Learn more about Professor Vaidyanathan] 01.03.12

Undergraduate students Zibo Chen, Shayan Doroudi, Yae Lim Lee, Gregory Izatt, and Sarah Wittman have won a gold Eric Winfreeaward at the 2011 International Bio-Molecular Design Competition (BIOMOD). BIOMOD is a competition for undergraduate teams who design research to address the control of biomolecules on the nanometer scale. The Caltech team’s challenge was to make a synthetic DNA robot that has the ability to take a random walk —instead of walking on set path or track—on a two-dimensional origami surface that was also made out of DNA. The team is mentored by Professor Eric Winfree and sponsored by the Molecular Programming Project. [Caltech Feature] [Video of Project] 11.21.11

For the second year the Times Higher Education world university rankings has ranked Caltech as number one in the subject of engineering and technology. [View Rankings] [Caltech Feature] 10.25.11

Electrical engineering graduate student Guoan ZhengGuoan Zheng, working with Professor Changhuei Yang and Professor Michael Elowitz, has built a platform for a “smart” petri dish, dubbed ePetri. “Our ePetri dish is a compact, small, lens-free microscopy imaging platform. We can directly track the cell culture or bacteria culture within the incubator,” explains Zheng, “the data from the ePetri dish automatically transfers to a computer outside the incubator by a cable connection… this technology can significantly streamline and improve cell culture experiments by cutting down on human labor and contamination risks.” [Calt