Research

The mission of the Resnick Sustainability Institute (RSI) is to support research and education at Caltech that addresses challenges and opportunities associated with climate change and the stewardship of natural resources.

RSI's research grants and facilities provide Caltech researchers from every division on campus the tools and support they need to tackle this mission. We lean on what makes Caltech special, a small, collaborative campus focused on understanding the fundamentals and then applying them.

RSI seeds new science and engineering research across campus, as well as supporting the developments necessary to turn these insights into practice. We encourage collaborations with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and other institutes around the world.

These four interconnected initiatives serve as intellectual guides for researchers thinking about how their work can be directed towards problems that scale to global impact. They are meant to leverage areas of strength within the Caltech research community, and also to highlight areas where Caltech's unique approach to research might create new opportunities for impactful research and development.

RSI supports several facilities to enable this broad research agenda. Most are housed in the Resnick Sustainability Center. These facilities provide state-of-the art tools and custom instrumentation available for campus researchers, as well as highly-trained scientific staff to collaborate and help shape complex research programs.