Alum
establishes grad fellowship
“It’s
habit-forming,” says Howard Oringer of his long rapport with faculty
and students at Caltech. Which is why the 1963 Caltech graduate established
the Oringer Fellowship Fund in Information Science and Technology, a $600,000
endowment to generate support for Caltech graduate students.
The reason,
Oringer says, is the people he meets at Caltech. “My visits to campus
to meet with graduate students and faculty have deepened my commitment
to Caltech and to the research model the Institute has uniquely developed,”
he says. “I marvel at the quality of the students, their ability
to communicate their ideas, and the diversity of backgrounds and interests.”
Recipients
of the fellowships will be selected in the area of a recently launched
Caltech initiative called Information Science and Technology (IST), with
a preference for students in mathematics of information. It is the first
integrated research and teaching activity in the country that investigates
information from all angles: from the fundamental theoretical underpinnings
of information to the science and engineering of novel information substrates,
biological circuits, and complex social systems. This is the IST’s
first graduate fellowship.
Oringer earned
his master’s degree in electrical engineering at Caltech before
embarking on his career in telecommunications. It was a mutual interest
in communications and networking that led him to the research of Michelle
Effros, an associate professor of electrical engineering, the director
of Caltech’s data compression laboratory, and an IST member.
“After
meeting with Michelle,” he says, “I realized the personal
impact she could make in an area I had spent my career involved in. So
I decided to make permanent the funding that I had supported her lab with
each year since 1996.”
Effros’s
research looks for ways to increase the speed of data transmission across
the Internet by compressing it. She and her colleagues use computer algorithms
that look for redundancies within disparate data and eliminate them. Once
the data reaches the receiving end, it is “reassembled” by
other algorithms.
“Howard’s
support over the years has been enormously valuable to both me and my
students. It really makes an incredible difference,” says Effros.
“Over time, Howard has become an integral part of the group. We
all really look forward to his visits. He brings to the table a wealth
of knowledge and experience and shares that openly with the students.
It’s a wonderful opportunity for them and for me.”
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