California Institute of Technology (Caltech)

The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) is a world-renowned science and engineering research and education institution, located in Pasadena, California, around 11 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles. 

Caltech has a high research output as well as many high-quality facilities such as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (owned by NASA), the Caltech Seismological Laboratory, and the International Observatory Network.  It’s among a small group of institutes of technology in the United States primarily devoted to teaching technical arts and applied sciences, and its fiercely competitive admissions process ensures only a small number of the most gifted students are admitted.

The university was founded as a preparatory and vocational school by Amos G. Throop in 1891, with the mission “to expand human knowledge and benefit society through research integrated with education”. It became a major hub of US scientific research in the early 20th century and was instrumental to the United States’ war effort during World War II. 

Today, it is home to the Einstein Papers Project, an initiative seeking to preserve, translate and publish selected papers from the estate of Albert Einstein. It has also established an energy innovation hub that aims to discovery revolutionary methods of generating fuels directly from sunlight.