Alumni to visit for Seminar Day weekend

Nostalgic reunions with former classmates and instructors, walking tours of the Caltech campus, fascinating seminars, and, of course, a bountiful barbecue await visiting alumni and their guests at this year’s Alumni Reunion Weekend and 67th Seminar Day.

Graduates from the class of 1939 and earlier will visit Caltech for this four-day suite of lectures and homecoming activities that begins on Thursday, May 13, and winds down on Sunday, May 16. Caltech alumni from all graduating classes are invited to attend.

The weekend is also the premier opportunity for alumni to get updates on the important research that continues to be conducted at Caltech. This year’s rich offering of seminar lectures, delivered by Caltech and JPL faculty and researchers, ranges from the field geology conducted by the Mars rovers, to the search for the roots of language, to the Galaxy Evolution Explorer’s quest to map the formation of stars. These lectures, scheduled to take place over five sessions on Saturday, showcase the wide variety of innovative and original scientific inquiry taking place at Caltech.

The Seminar Day lectures will begin on Saturday with the first hour-long session at 9 a.m. At 11 a.m., visitors will congregate at Beckman Auditorium, where six Caltech graduates will receive the Distinguished Alumni Award to recognize their achievements.

Caltech’s 2004 distinguished alumni are M. Blouke Carus, BS ’49; Naren K. Gupta, MS ’70; Kenneth I. Kellermann, PhD ’63; Robert P. Kirshner, PhD ’75; Gerhard H. Parker, BS ’65, MS ’66, PhD ’70; and H. Gerard Schwartz Jr., PhD ’66. The award ceremony will be followed by general session speaker Paul B. MacCready Jr.’s address “Frontiers of Aeronautics and Fluid Mechanics.” MacCready is himself a Caltech alum, having earned his PhD here in 1952.

It’s not only professors who will be delivering seminars; Caltech students also take part in Seminar Day, namely through the Everhart and SURF lecture series. This year, Houman D. Hemmati, a graduate student in biology, and Melinda J. Kellogg, a graduate student in physics, will discuss their research findings. Sophomores Joseph E. Gonzalez and Miling Yan, the winners of the Doris S. Perpall Summer Undergraduate and Research Fellowships (SURF) Speaking Awards for Excellent Oral Presentation, will also speak.

This weekend coincides with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Open House, which will take place on Saturday and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Exhibits and demonstrations will celebrate the Laboratory’s accomplishments in space exploration while researchers will answer questions about the ways they use technology to explore Earth and the planets beyond our solar system.

On the social side, class reunion plans are in place for alumni celebrating their first-year reunion and those from every fifth year (fifth through 65th year). These reunions are ideal social events at which to reconnect with college buddies and research colleagues, to network, and to catch up on old times.

Alums celebrating their 50th classreunion—the Half Century Club—will be treated on Thursday to a tour of the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Alumni from the earliest classes (1939, 1944, 1949, and 1954) will be able to choose from a selection of events that include a reception at president David Baltimore’s residence, an illustrated lecture on Caltech’s architectural gems by Romy Wyllie, a walking tour of the campus led by the Caltech Architectural Tour Service, and two student chamber-music concerts.

This weekend of events is all the more noteworthy in that it will mark the first reunion of members of Caltech’s varsity football teams from the years 1964 to 1970. This special reunion is scheduled for Saturday at 6 p.m., in the Avery Center.

The deadline to arrange reservations for this weekend falls on May 3. Same-day registration will be available for Seminar Day only on Saturday, May 15, at the registration tent on the Beckman Mall. For further information, visit the Caltech Alumni Association at www.its.caltech.edu/~alumni, or call (626) 395-8366.
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