André Hoelz, Caltech's newest assistant professor of chemistry, endeavors to fully characterize the nuclear pore complex, a cellular component made up of many copies of about 30 different proteins—perhaps 1,000 proteins in all and 10 million atoms—which forms a transport channel in the membrane of the nuclear envelope. Hoelz calls the complex "the gatekeeper of the nucleus." 

Ahmed Zewail, the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemistry and professor of physics at Caltech, has been named one of the Top American Leaders of 2011 by The Washington Post and Harvard Kennedy School's Center for Public Leadership.

Mark E. Davis and David A. Tirrell of Caltech have been elected to the Institute of Medicine, an honor that is considered among the highest in the fields of health and medicine. Both Davis and Tirrell are already members of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, making them two of only 13 living individuals who have been elected to all three branches of the National Academies.

Today, President Obama will present Jacqueline K. Barton, chair of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Caltech, and six other recipients with the National Medal of Science. The ceremony is scheduled to be webcast live at 11 a.m. (PT) on the White House website.

In a strategic move to strengthen fundamental science and technology and foster transformational advances in renewable energies, the Dow Chemical Company (NYSE: DOW) and Caltech have established a $10 million partnership.

A look back at the work that earned Rudy Marcus, the Noyes Professor of Chemistry, the Nobel Prize in 1992.

Caltech has been rated the world's number one university in the 2011–2012 Times Higher Education global ranking of the top 200 universities, displacing Harvard University from the top spot for the first time in the survey's eight-year history. 

Jacqueline K. Barton, the Arthur and Marian Hanisch Memorial Professor of Chemistry and chair of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Caltech—a leader in studies of the chemistry of DNA—has been named one of seven recipients of the National Medal of Science, the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on scientists. 

Four members of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) faculty—William Clemons Jr., assistant professor of biochemistry; Thanos Siapas, professor of computation and neural systems; Long Cai, assistant professor of chemistry; and Lea Goentoro, assistant professor of biology—have been named among the researchers being given National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director's Awards.

Caltech senior Wilson Ho spent his summer completing a SURF project in the lab of Robert Grubbs, one of the winners of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Ho tells his nonscientist friends and family that the goal of his project is to develop "stem-cell Band-Aids" that might one day help restore vision in those suffering from macular degeneration.