From the Provost’s Point of View
David Tirrell. Photo: Lance Hayashida/Caltech
David A. Tirrell, the Ross McCollum-William H. Corcoran Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering; Carl and Shirley Larson Provostial Chair, has served as Caltech’s provost since 2017. As he begins a new term, Tirrell reflects on how the Caltech campus and culture have changed over his first five years in the position, and what he’s excited for next.
Q: How would you sum up your first five years as provost?
Tirrell: I think the first responsibility of the provost is helping the divisions build and foster the success of the faculty. It’s the first priority because the quality of the faculty is so essential to our overall institutional success, both in education and in research.
Faculty hiring is primarily a divisional responsibility, but the provost and the president consult with the divisions and provide much in the way of the needed resources. The resources for laboratory renovations, for example, are all provided from the central funds of the Institute. And most of the startup funds are under the control of the provost. So, planning, managing that process, making sure that we get absolutely the best people here. Like everything else at Caltech, it’s done on a small scale. We hire only about 10 or 11 new faculty members each year, so it’s especially important that it be done with extra care.
The divisions have done a terrific job of finding talented people and persuading them that Caltech is the right place for them to work, then providing them with good facilities and a rich intellectual environment.
We don’t get everybody we try to bring here, but we have a success rate of about 75 percent. Because we do most of our hiring at the assistant professor level, it’s clear that Caltech is regarded by young scientists, engineers, social scientists, and humanists as the best place for them to build their careers. The essential job of the provost is to make sure that that remains true.
Q: What do you see as some of the Institute’s biggest advancements over the past several years?
Tirrell: The creation of the Resnick Sustainability Institute would be right up there. That’s a major development for Caltech and for sustainability research worldwide. The new Resnick building is going up, and every Caltech student will take laboratory courses in that building. That’ll be an opportunity to immerse them in thinking about sustainability problems and how they can be addressed.
The Merkin Institute for Translational Research is another extremely important addition to the campus. It strengthens both our fundamental research and our impact on human health.
I would also cite a series of institutional partnerships that will enhance the Caltech environment in the coming years. The Carnegie Institution is moving its life sciences research effort to Pasadena to a property up on Green Street, two blocks from the campus. We’re making space available for them in the Kerckhoff and Church buildings until they can construct their research center up on Green, which will probably be two to three years from now.
The Carnegie partnership is representative of a broader strategy. One of the challenges that Caltech always has is, how do we continue to take advantage of our small size while mitigating the disadvantages? I think it’s fair to say that most of our community thinks we should remain small—that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. One way to mitigate the disadvantages is to bring to the neighborhood other organizations with complementary interests and skills and resources. Carnegie certainly fits that description. Because its scientific thrusts are similar and complementary to ours, it creates an opportunity for our scientists at every level to take advantage of a broader intellectual community than they would have if they were restricted to the campus alone. We’re still Caltech, they’re still Carnegie, but we can interact when it’s advantageous for each organization, and we can operate separately when that’s what’s needed.
So, that’s one partnership. The next one, which is further along, is our partnership with Amazon Web Services. We have two scientific and technological areas of collaboration, one in computer vision and one in quantum computing. We took the extraordinary step of having AWS build a building on our campus. They will occupy that building for 10 years, assuming the project continues to be successful, and it appears to be quite successful in its early stages.
There are close to a hundred people in that building. They are largely AWS employees, but the project is led by two Caltech professors, Oskar Painter and Fernando Brandao. There’s Caltech leadership of the project, but it’s a project that requires industrial investment. It’s not something that Caltech could undertake on its own because of the practical engineering challenges that are involved in building a practical quantum computer. It would be terrific if Caltech technology created a path to the new technology of quantum computing.
Q: Does this mark a change in the way Caltech operates and thinks about itself?
Tirrell: Doing it at this level of intimacy, I’d say that’s new. We have joint programs with City of Hope. We’ve had joint programs with UCLA. But I don’t believe we’ve actually tried to bring the partner organization to the neighborhood before. That’s the difference.
And it’s a difference in scale, too. We’re planning an innovation center on another Green Street lot. It’ll be right across the street from Carnegie, and that will provide almost 100,000 square feet of space for startup companies, many of which will be Caltech startup companies.
The innovation center has a dual objective. One is to keep Caltech startups in the neighborhood if we can. But even if they’re not Caltech startups, if they’re interesting companies with interesting technologies, there are both intellectual and employment opportunities with those organizations. They add to the appeal of Pasadena as a place that has a strong science and technology community.
At the suggestion of our mathematicians, we recently persuaded the American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) to move to Pasadena. It will move to campus and hold many of its activities on the eighth floor of Caltech Hall, where with Richard Merkin’s help, we’re creating a new conference center in connection with a new Merkin Center for Pure and Applied Mathematics. AIM, which is currently in the Bay Area, functions in large part by organizing workshops and small focus groups to work on unsolved mathematical problems. It runs one or two workshops per month, each of which might draw 30 to 40 people. This means we’re likely to see several hundred mathematicians coming to Caltech from all over the world each year. So while our mathematics faculty will remain small, we will have a mechanism for forging connections with a much larger math community.
Q: What goals are you looking toward for the next five years?
Tirrell: To go back to responsibility number one, hiring another group of 50 to 60 outstanding new faculty members, and ensuring their success, both in education and in research. We have a strong, shared interest in creating a more diverse community at the Institute at every level. We’ve made some progress, and advancing that objective through our hiring processes will be important.
Continuing to look for ways to enrich our intellectual environment, whether through partnerships or other means, also will be an area of focus.
Q: How does being provost match up with your expectations for the job?
Tirrell: I was division chair in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering from 1999 until 2009. Because the division chairs report to the provost, I had pretty good look at what the job was. But after getting into it, like many others, it turns out it’s a bigger job than I realized. So, it is different. I think I would find it difficult to maintain the kind of research program that I led as division chair while serving as provost. The provost job just requires more time. So, to do it at this career stage when I would’ve been scaling back my research program anyway, it’s turned out to be a good time to do it.
And seeing the things that we’ve just talked about take shape—that’s satisfying.
Q: The defining event of the past several years undoubtedly has been the COVID-19 pandemic. What lessons learned from the pandemic are you taking forward?
Tirrell: I don’t feel as though I view Caltech differently now than I did before the pandemic. I am gratified by the response of the Caltech community to the challenges of the pandemic. The community accepted limitations on their normal activities while at the same time trying to sustain those activities at the highest possible level. I think that’s true of the academic parts of the institute, and I think it’s true of the support units on the campus who did everything they could possibly do to keep the academic mission healthy.
Because we have a scientifically sophisticated community, our people were willing to do what needed to be done to get through the pandemic. We didn’t have politicization of the pandemic on the campus. There were disagreements about how long we needed to have a mask mandate in place, or what kind of surveillance testing we ought to be doing, and some other things. But they were well-informed disagreements, and they were points on which reasonable, well-informed people could disagree. But once decisions were made, people accepted them and continued to do their work.
This is an extraordinary community of people. I really do regard it is a privilege to work here. To spend your life surrounded by people like those we have here is a remarkable gift. It reminds me of the importance of Caltech as an institution. It’s important to the nation; it’s important to the world. It’s a distinctive institution; it’s more different from other institutions than one realizes before coming here. If anything, the pandemic reinforced those things.
Before I came to Caltech, I worked at two other universities over 20 years. I liked working at both of those too. But Caltech is different—the small size, the intimacy, the focus, the realization and the acceptance that we don’t have to do everything because we can’t do everything. It’s liberating to realize that you can focus on the things that make Caltech distinctive and irreplaceable. To be given a role in shaping such an organization is an extraordinary opportunity.