Kent and Joyce Kresa Endow Professorial Chair
Kent Kresa, interim chairman of General Motors, and his wife have pledged $2 million to Caltech to endow the Joyce and Kent Kresa Professorship in Engineering and Applied Science. Kresa is chairman of the Caltech Board of Trustees. The Kresa gift is matched with an additional $1 million provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Matching Program. The chair will support and recognize a faculty member in engineering and applied science, with a preference for faculty in aeronautics and aerospace engineering, fields Kresa has helped shape, most notably in 28 years with Northrop Grumman, which included 13 as the company's CEO and chairman. "Our very good friends the Kresas have shared their time, vision, and resources with Caltech for many years," said Caltech president Jean-Lou Chameau.

Tesla Motors CEO Visits Large Hadron Collider at CERN
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motros and cofounder of SpaceX, recently visited CERN, where he discussed his vision of the innovative technologies behind energy and space exploration. On June 22, Musk toured the tunnel where the powerful Large Hadron Collider is installed and preparing to deliver head-on proton-proton collisions, as well as the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment with Caltech professors Harvey Newman and Maria Spiropulu. He also met with the researchers in the Caltech group, CMS spokesperson Tejinder (Jim) Virdee, and a number of young researchers working on CMS and the LHC. Musk said he was greatly impressed with the complexity of both the accelerator and the CMS experiment, as well as the ambitious scientific program of the LHC.

Caltech, PCC's Biotech Bridge
This fall, up to 10 Pasadena City College students will work with stem cells at Caltech, thanks to a $1.7 million grant and the leadership of a former Caltech postdoc. Others will follow in 2010 and 2011. Upon completing the program, they will be fully prepped to work on the frontiers of biomedicine as stem-cell lab techs. PCC is the only two-year college among 11 institutions statewide to win one of these "Bridges to Stem Cell Research" grants from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, established in 2005 after the passage of Proposition 71, the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative. "It's such an incredible opportunity for PCC to partner with Caltech," says professor Pamela Eversole-Cire, director of the biotechnology program at PCC. "We're very excited."