California Institute of Technology

The California Institute of Technology is a small private research university in Pasadena, California. It was founded in 1891 as Throop University by Amos G. Throop and took its current name in 1920. Astronomer George Ellery Hale, physicist Robert Millikan and chemist Arthur Amos Noyes turned it into a research institute. The campus covers about 124 acres, and the university is deliberately small in enrollment and faculty.

Caltech has six academic divisions: Biology and Biological Engineering; Chemistry and Chemical Engineering; Engineering and Applied Science; Geological and Planetary Sciences; Humanities and Social Sciences; and Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy. It manages the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA and operates the LIGO gravitational-wave observatories with MIT. It also runs Palomar Observatory and is a partner in the W. M. Keck Observatory. The Seismological Laboratory and the Resnick Sustainability Institute are also central to graduate research.

Caltech enrolls about 2,400 students. Roughly 1,400 are graduate students, so they outnumber undergraduates, and the professorial faculty numbers about 300. International students make up a substantial share of doctoral enrollment. More than 45 Nobel laureates have been affiliated with Caltech. Alumni include chemist Linus Pauling, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore and physicist Kip Thorne.

Graduate study is mainly doctoral, and admitted PhD students typically receive full financial support through fellowships and research or teaching assistantships. Students work closely with faculty in small research groups, often across division lines, and interact directly with JPL scientists. Master's degrees are offered in a limited number of engineering fields. The academic year has three terms: fall, winter and spring. An honor code governs campus life. Pasadena is a residential city in the San Gabriel Valley, connected to downtown Los Angeles by Metro light rail.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, California Institute of Technology lists 53 graduate programs across 20 subjects: 7 master's programs and 44 doctoral programs, with the widest choice in biology, earth & environmental sciences and computer science. California Institute of Technology holds rank 9 in the GSN Overall University Ranking.