On January 14, 2025, President Biden honored nearly 400 junior faculty members from across the country with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). Among the honorees are three Caltech professors: Katherine Bouman, associate professor of computing and mathematical sciences, electrical engineering and astronomy; Katerina Chatziioannou, assistant professor of physics; and Nicholas Hutzler (BS '07), also an assistant professor of physics.
PECASE was first established in 1996 by President Clinton to foster innovative developments in science and technology, increase awareness of careers in science and engineering, give recognition to the scientific missions of participating agencies, enhance connections between fundamental research and many of the grand challenges facing the nation, and highlight the importance of science and technology for America's future. The award is the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers. Throughout his presidency, Biden "has recognized the important role that science and technology play in creating a better society," according to a White House press release.
Katie Bouman, who is also a Rosenberg Scholar and a Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator, has been at Caltech since 2019. Bouman is a computational imaging scientist whose methods combine ideas from signal processing, computer vision, machine learning, and physics to bring out hidden signals in scientific and technical data. She is a key member of the Event Horizon Telescope project, which made history in 2019 by unveiling the first image of a black hole, in this case, a supermassive black hole lying at the heart of the M87 galaxy. Using data acquired by a global network of radio telescopes, Bouman and her teammates developed a computational approach that transformed the black hole data into an image. Since then, her team has helped produce an image of the supermassive black hole at the heart of our Milky Way Galaxy, called Sagittarius A*, as well as a new image of the M87 black hole made with enhanced data. Bouman is also developing next-generation computational cameras for other imaging problems in astronomy, medicine, and seismology, which cannot be solved with traditional cameras. Bouman earned her BS from the University of Michigan and her MS and PhD from MIT.
Katerina Chatziioannou, who earned her undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Athens and her PhD in physics from Montana State University, studies the properties of gravitational waves and the general theory of relativity using data from space- and ground-based observatories, and in particular from LIGO, which made history in 2015 for making the first direct detection of gravitational waves. Chatziioannou is interested in the physics of extremely dense objects in space, such as black holes and neutron stars, which emit gravitational waves as they spiral together and merge. One of her goals is to use these gravitational waves from collisions of neutron stars to study what happens when matter is pushed to extreme densities and temperatures. She joined the Caltech faculty in 2020 and was named a William H. Hurt Scholar in 2021.
Caltech alumnus Nick Hutzler received his PhD from Harvard University in 2014 and joined the Caltech faculty in 2017. His research probes the fundamental laws of physics through tabletop experiments. With help from lasers, he makes very precise measurements of atoms and molecules to search for new particles and forces and "broken symmetries" in the laws of physics. Hutzler's work may help solve the question of what happened to all the antimatter in our universe: researchers believe that very early on in the formation of the universe, broken symmetries may have tipped the balance of matter such that antimatter disappeared. His research also has applications in quantum science. The same laser-based methods he uses for fundamental physics research are useful for controlling and engineering molecular interactions to study quantum information, matter, and chemistry.
