A Caltech alumna comes home, ‘igniting’ hope among new students

It’s official: The journey has begun.

Walking through orange, teal and white balloon arches, a few hundred students file into the Beckman Auditorium at Caltech’s convocation on Friday, Sept. 25.

The convocation ceremony marks the official formal welcome to the school’s incoming undergraduate and graduate students.

Faculty and staff stood, clapping to welcome in the new group of students.

The theme of the convocation centered around collaboration and teamwork — important themes in a student’s journey of hard work and innovation at the renowned Pasadena campus, where the likes of Albert Einstein roamed and scores of students paved paths in the worlds of science, engineering and technology, among others.

“For more than a century, Caltech has been a place where courageous and visionary thinkers have pursued the hardest questions at the very edge of human understanding and found new ways of answering them,” Caltech President Ray Jayawardhana told the audience – his first convocation as the institute’s new president. “You now take your place in that pioneering tradition.”

“There’s no precise formula for it, but sustained curiosity and a willingness to fail makes success more likely, and the path more fun,” he added.

Jayawardhana said he was excited to see the learning, discovering, and inventing that the incoming class will do.

The convocation’s keynote speaker was Tammy Ma, who graduated from Caltech in 2005 with an aerospace engineering bachelor’s degree.

Ma is a plasma physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where she leads efforts to advance nuclear fusion as a source of abundant energy.

In the last few years, Ma was on a team that was able to successfully create a fusion ignition, essentially creating a star in a laboratory setting.

This happened for the first time in 1952 when testing a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific Ocean, Ma said. The star she helped create was the first of its kind done in a controlled setting.

“This breakthrough was over six decades in the making,” Ma said. Generations of scientists, engineers, theorists, and experimentalists have been working together to pursue the extraordinary goal of fusion ignition.”

Themes throughout this scientific breakthrough was collaboration and teamwork. The publication of that first ignition had more than 1,000 authors, Ma said.

This research into fusion is a possible solution for a path to clean, abundant, safe nuclear energy, Ma said.

“I don’t think I need to expand on all of our current world energy needs,” Ma said. “We already know about AI and data centers, and the high cost of gas, especially here in California.”

With fusion, Ma said there’s potential to deploy energy-intensive technologies we already have, but that are too expensive right now such as carbon absorption and desalination.

The national importance is that it could reduce dependence on imported fossil fuels, especially those that lead to wars.

“You’re all walking in here with a spark,” Ma said. “You can spark into a runaway (hydrogen) bomb, or you can spark into a steady star. The power is the same, the difference is in the control.”

To end the ceremony, a new tradition involving light sticks was done for the first time. Holding a white light stick in the air, students sang the school’s alma mater before heading out to enjoy a complementary breakfast.

“May your ideas ignite, and may they illuminate your future,” Ma said.

Many students approached Ma after the ceremony, expressing their appreciation for her speech. Many told her they were inspired by her journey.

Gheneruno Ekuerhare, a freshman, was one of the many inspired students. Ekuerhare hopes to study mathematics and do mathematical research.

“Normally, when you think of people that have such accomplishments in their field, it’s someone decades into it,” Ekuerhare, 18, said. “To see someone that’s only about 20 years away from us do something this huge is very inspiring.”

“It felt more relatable, hearing her experience and difficulties, knowing that she made it resonated more with me,” Ekuerhare added.