Four for Twenty

This year’s Discover 50, an annual list of the “best brains in science” published by Discover magazine, features four Caltech “young visionaries” in the article titled “20 Under 40”—Assistant Professor of Biology and Applied Physics Michael Elowitz; Assistant Professor of Biology Sarkis Mazmanian; Associate Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering Tapio Schneider; and Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering Changhuei Yang.

Elowitz designs and builds cellular “circuits,” as described in E&S No. 1, 2008. Mazmanian studies the “good” bacteria that live in our guts and symbiotically help our immune systems keep us healthy. Schneider makes computer models of the complex effects of atmospheric turbulence and heat transfer on global climate change. And Yang has built a lensless microscope-on-a-chip that could be incorporated into a pocket-sized device for analyzing blood samples or potable water supplies in the developing world.

UCLA, Harvard, and MIT were the only other institutions having more than one person on the list, with two each.—DS