Share
This April, as part of Earth Week 2021, Caltech’s Watson Lecture Series will highlight groundbreaking research to capitalize on the inexhaustible energy of the sun. Jonas Peters, Bren Professor of Chemistry in the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering (CCE) and the director of Caltech’s Resnick Sustainability Institute (RSI), will explain why the untapped potential of solar energy is crucial for reducing carbon emissions, decreasing waste, and lessening CO2 emissions; why these goals are essential to mitigating the worst effects of climate change; and how advances in chemistry can make this future possible.
Peters’s lecture, “Sunlight to Everything: Catalyzing a Sustainable Future,” continues the 2020–2021 Watson Lecture season on Wednesday, April 21, at 5 p.m. Pacific Time.
Watson Lecture: Ken Farley Explores Perseverance Rover s Mission on Mars
On Wednesday, March 10, at 5 p.m. Pacific Time, Ken Farley, the W. M. Keck Foundation Professor of Geochemistry in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS), continues the 2020–2021 Watson Lecture season with Perseverance on Mars.
As project scientist for the Mars 2020 mission, Farley led the science team and worked with engineers to design and build the Perseverance rover. After eight years of development at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which Caltech manages for NASA, Perseverance launched on July 30, 2020; just over six months later, on February 18, 2021, it successfully landed on the Red Planet. At Caltech, Farley s research focuses on the geochemistry of noble gases and its applications to a range of Earth science problems, as well as the exploration of Mars and its geochemistry, geology, and geomorphology. Much of