Programs

Toward that end, the IST initiative has a number of seed grants for students and faculty pursuing creative (crazy) new ideas that cut across disciplines.

• Carver Mead New Adventures gives yearly grants to projects that are too early stage to attract industry or government support. The fund seeks to enable faculty to pursue exploratory, out-of-the-box projects that cross traditional disciplinary lines. [Read more][Previous recipients]
• The Grace Hopper Travel Grant program sponsors graduate and undergraduate students at Caltech to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration each year. The Grace Hopper Celebration is the world's largest gathering of women technologists, and is sponsored by the Anita Borg Institute. The travel grant program aims to send every female student interested in attending at least once during their time at Caltech.
• The Kortschak Scholars Program seeks to launch a new era of scholarship, inquiry, and innovation in the artificially intelligent future by allowing top graduate students to be unconstrained in their pursuit of new areas of research in computer science, during their first years in the PhD program. [Read more][Previous recipients]
• IST also awards the Ben P.C. Chou Doctoral Prize each year to doctoral dissertations in the broad area of information science and technology. The Prize was established by his wife, June, and his son, Scott (BS 1986), as a lasting tribute for Ben's lifetime dedication to the pursuit of scholarly research. [Read more][Previous recipients]
• The Simoudis Discovery Fund provides seed funds for emerging projects at the intersection of big data, machine learning, and autonomy. The funds are allocated yearly to a mix of student and faculty projects. [Read more][Previous recipients]
• The IST Meeting of the Minds is a research conference featuring keynote talks from leading scientists in industry and a poster session with presentations by distinguished Caltech faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates, showcasing the latest work underway. [Read more]
• The Wally Baer and Jeri Weiss Postdoctoral Scholar in Computing and Mathematical Sciences is an endowed postdoctoral scholarship seeking to Caltech exceptional scholars whose work spans traditional academic disciplines to address fundamental problems in science and technology [Read more]
• IST has partnered with PIMCO to pursue research and education in Data Science.  This partnership touches all levels of research at Caltech and includes support for both PIMCO graduate and postdoctoral fellowships in data science. [Read more][Previous recipients]

In addition to these cross-cutting programs, most IST-sponsored centers have active postdoctoral programs that recruit yearly. For information on current calls for applications, go to the CMS position page.