Four from Caltech among top 100

Michelle Effros, associate professor of electrical engineering, Stephen Quake, associate professor of applied physics, and two Caltech PhDs, Kelvin Lee and Suzie Hwang Pun, have been named to the TR100, the world’s top 100 young innovators according to Technology Review magazine, which is published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The theme for the 2002 TR100 selection has been the transformation of existing industries and the creation of new ones, particularly in “hot spots” such as information technology, biotechnology and medicine, nanotechnology and materials, energy, and transportation.

Effros, who is director of Caltech’s data-compression lab, conducts research on information compression and communication, with applications to the World Wide Web, signal processing, wireless communications, Internet and wireless networks, data storage devices, and speech recognition.

Quake’s work involves biophysics and microfluidic devices. He uses biological molecules as model systems for studying physics, and his work in microfluidics has led to the development of “lab on a chip” devices that will enable advances in biology and medicine.

Lee, who received his PhD in chemical engineering from Caltech in 1995, is an assistant professor in Cornell University’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. As a Caltech postdoc, he discovered a marker protein for identifying Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans and, later, for “mad cow disease” in cattle, and he is looking for indicators for variant CJD and for Alzheimer’s disease.

Pun received her PhD in chemical engineering from Caltech in 2001. She uses polymers—rather than viruses, which can be intercepted by the immune system—to carry injected genes through the bloodstream to precise locations, which, in addition to gene-therapy applications, opens up the possibility of accurate drug delivery; the Pasadena company Insert Therapeutics was founded primarily to exploit her work.

The judges for the TR100 nomination and selection process included Caltech president David Baltimore.
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