Three Caltech Fulbrights
Caltech seniors Jonathan Liu, Charles Tschirhart, and Caroline Werlang will be engaging in research abroad as Fulbright Scholars this fall. Sponsored by the Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the Fulbright Program was established in 1946 to honor the late Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas for his contributions to fostering international understanding.
Jonathan Liu is an applied physics major from Pleasanton, California, who will be doing research at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich in Germany. He plans to work with a biophysicist studying how DNA moves in a liquid with a thermal gradient, which could shed light on the molecular origins of life. Long strands of DNA should break apart well before they have time to organize themselves into the complicated arrangements needed to be self-reproducing, but previous work in the lab Liu is joining has hinted that deep-sea hydrothermal vents may have allowed long strands to form stable clusters. Liu plans to enroll at UC Berkeley for graduate study in physics at the PhD level on his return; he was awarded one of UC Berkley's Graduate Student Instructorships to support his work.
Charles Tschirhart of Naperville, Illinois, is a double major in applied physics and chemistry. He will be studying condensed matter physics at the University of Nottingham, England, where he plans to develop new ways to "photograph" nanometer-sized (billionth-of-a-meter-sized) objects using atomic force microscopy. He will then proceed to UC Santa Barbara to earn a PhD in experimental condensed matter physics. Charles has won both a Hertz fellowship and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship; both will support his PhD work at UC Santa Barbara.
Caroline Werlang, a chemical engineering student from Houston, Texas, will go to the Institute of Bioengineering at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland to work on kinases, which are proteins that act as molecular "on/off" switches. She will join a lab that is trying to determine how kinases select and bind to their targets in order to initiate or block other biological processes—an important step toward designing a synthetic kinase that could activate a tumor-suppressor protein, for example. After her Fulbright, she will pursue a doctorate in biological engineering at MIT. Caroline's PhD studies will be supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.
The Fulbright Program is the flagship international exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government. Seniors and graduate students who compete in the U.S. Fulbright Student Program can apply to one of the more than 160 countries whose universities are willing to host Fulbright Scholars. For the academic program, which sponsors one academic year of study or research abroad after the bachelor's degree, each applicant must submit a plan of research or study, a personal essay, three academic references, and a transcript that demonstrates a record of outstanding academic work.
