Carnegie Science and Caltech: A History of Collaboration

Carnegie Science has formed a strategic new research alliance with Caltech in the life and environmental sciences and strengthened our historic partnership in astronomy and astrophysics. We are confident that this enhanced relationship will enable groundbreaking work across many of our scientific disciplines. However, this isn’t the first major collaboration between our two scientific powerhouses. Our histories are already well intertwined.
 

Observatories

The Carnegie Science Observatories and Caltech share a founding father and a long history of collaboration in astronomy and astrophysics. George Ellery Hale, who established the Observatories, then called Mount Wilson Observatory, was also the driving force behind Caltech’s transformation from Throop Polytechnic Institute to the world-class institution it is today. 

Hale arrived in Pasadena from Chicago in 1903 and the next year successfully lobbied Carnegie Science to establish an observatory in the San Gabriel Mountains. Over the ensuing decades, with Carnegie support, Hale transformed U.S. astronomy. 

In 1906 Hale became a trustee of Caltech, then a vocational school known as Throop Polytechnic Institute, and set to work on its improvement and development. His plan was to build Throop into a first-rate institution for science and engineering on par with Mount Wilson Observatory, with which it could collaborate in fundamental research. 

Mount Wilson Observatory and Caltech were part of Hale’s larger dream for Pasadena as a center for scientific and cultural excellence. Hale was a major force in making this ambition for Pasadena a reality, also serving as a member of the Pasadena Planning Committee and encouraging his friend Henry Huntington’s establishment of the Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens that bear his name. 

By the end of the 1920s, Hale’s vision for Mount Wilson Observatory and Caltech was largely realized. Mount Wilson Observatory had developed into a celebrated center for astronomy and astrophysics, where Edwin Hubble, who joined the staff in 1919, discovered the universe in 1923 and showed that the universe was expanding in 1929. Caltech, which adopted its new name in 1920, had gained national prominence in engineering and the physical sciences and begun developing in the life sciences.

Attracted by the research at Mount Wilson Observatory and Caltech, Albert Einstein visited Pasadena during the winters of 1931, 1932, and 1933. Einstein was a research associate and then visiting professor at Caltech and split his time between Caltech and Carnegie’s Mount Wilson Observatory, visiting the mountain and the Observatory offices in Pasadena and participating in staff meetings. Meeting with physicists and astronomers in the Observatory library, Einstein announced that although he'd been famously resistant to Edwin Hubble's assertion that the universe was expanding, the visit had changed his mind.

Hale is celebrated for conceiving and developing the world’s largest telescopes four times over, including the 60-inch and 100-inch reflectors at Carnegie’s Mount Wilson Observatory and the 200-inch reflector at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory. Mount Wilson Observatory astronomers contributed to the design and planning for the 200-inch telescope, and when it saw first light in 1949 Carnegie’s Edwin Hubble was the first to use it, taking an image of Hubble’s Variable Nebula NGC 2261. In 1948, Carnegie and Caltech entered into a cooperative partnership for the joint operation of the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories. The two observatories were managed as one, with a single scientific and administrative director and a unified staff composed of Carnegie and Caltech astronomers. 

This close relationship between Carnegie and Caltech existed until 1980. However, as Los Angeles grew and light pollution increasingly hindered scientific observing, the two institutions developed different strategies for advancing the fields of astronomy and astrophysics. Pursuing a Southern Hemisphere view of the sky, Carnegie purchased land in Chile’s Atacama Desert in 1969 and established Las Campanas Observatory, home of the Swope, du Pont, and twin Magellan telescopes, as well as the future site of the Giant Magellan Telescope, currently under construction. Whereas Caltech invested in the Northern Hemisphere and telescopes in Hawaii.

Although Carnegie and Caltech’s observing strategies diverged for several decades, collaboration between the institutions recently resumed. Since 2013, there have been several joint Carnegie-Caltech postdocs in astrophysical theory. All of the postdocs from both the Carnegie Observatories and Caltech also participate in a communal annual retreat. Furthermore, the two institutions have collaborated on several community and outreach activities in Pasadena and beyond, including a program to bring Carnegie’s portable planetarium to pediatric hospitals prior to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Seismology Laboratory 

Carnegie Science and Caltech also share historic collaborations in the Earth sciences, most significantly the Seismology Laboratory, which was founded in 1921 under the auspices of Carnegie and operated as a joint venture between 1926 and 1936. 

Pioneering seismologist Harry Oscar Wood’s early career research on the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake was funded by Carnegie as part of Andrew C. Lawson’s enormous study of the disaster, published by Carnegie in 1908. Wood was inspired to tackle the problem of recording and predicting local earthquakes and years later he returned to the institution with a proposal for a regional seismic monitoring program in California. In 1921 the institution established the Carnegie Seismology Advisory Committee with Carnegie Geophysical Laboratory director Arthur Day as chairman and Wood as the research associate in charge of the day-to-day program operations. 

Wood went to Pasadena, where, in space provided by Hale at Carnegie’s Mount Wilson Observatory, he and Carnegie astronomer and optics expert John Anderson developed the Wood-Anderson torsion seismograph, an instrument capable of recording the high-frequency waves associated with local earthquakes.

With his instrument in hand, Wood turned to the problem of building a set of observation stations to begin monitoring local earthquakes, with an initial plan to establish five Carnegie-funded stations located within 70 miles of Pasadena.

This work served as a stimulus for the creation of the Caltech Seismological Laboratory. Knowing that Wood was seeking a location for a central observing station in Pasadena and that Caltech had recently received a major grant to start a geology and geophysics program, Hale suggested a collaboration. Carnegie and Caltech entered into a cooperative agreement in 1926 providing that Carnegie’s seismology program, under Wood’s direction, would be housed at a new Seismology Laboratory to be constructed by Caltech. In return, Caltech scientists had the right to participate in the research, which was funded by Carnegie. 

The collaboration was a productive one. By 1929, Southern California's first seismic network was in place. Large quantities of data were collected, and numerous new fault zones identified. Wood made certain that this information was communicated to the public regularly through bulletins and other publications. These efforts paid off. When the Long Beach earthquake struck on March 10, 1933, for instance, even though there was severe damage, 120 dead and property damage of $400 million by today’s standards, there was also a level of preparedness on the part of the inhabitants that was unprecedented.

The Seismology Laboratory attracted gifted scientists, including seismologist Hugo Benioff in 1924, physicist Charles Richter in 1927, and German geophysicist Beno Gutenberg in 1930. In the early 1930s, in collaboration with Gutenberg and using data from the Southern Californian network of Wood-Anderson seismographs, Richter developed the scale for measuring the magnitude of earthquakes that bears his name. 

In 1936 Carnegie transferred administration of the Seismology Laboratory to Caltech, confident that the important work it had begun would be aptly continued. Arthur Day later wrote “It had been our hope from the beginning that a research program so closely related to the welfare of the west coast region might attract tangible support from the community served… It was therefore quite natural that in 1936 the management of the enterprise should gradually come to center in California Institute, a local institution as opposed to Carnegie Institution with its headquarters in Washington, D.C.” 

In 2021, Carnegie Science named two inaugural Harry Oscar Wood chairs in seismology at our Earth and Planets Laboratory in Washington, D.C., burnishing Wood’s already considerable legacy.

Life and Environmental Sciences

Carnegie Science and Caltech both celebrate long and productive histories in the life and environmental sciences. Just one year after its founding, Carnegie established the Desert Lab at Tumamoc Hill and quickly expanded and deepened biology work in ecology, marine biology, genetics, and embryology, eventually supporting three Nobel Prize winners and playing a foundational role in the establishment of new fields. The Caltech Division of Biology was founded in 1928 by distinguished biologist and Carnegie Research Associate Thomas Hunt Morgan, who was recruited to build the department on Hale’s suggestion. 

In recent decades, Carnegie and Caltech scientists have collaborated on projects, including the development of novel tools to measure photosynthetic activity from space, which involved Staff Scientist Emeritus Joseph Berry’s work with the Keck Institute for Studies in Space, and analyses of the U.S. energy grid and renewable capabilities conducted by emeritus staff scientist Ken Caldeira in conjunction with Caltech scientists. In May of 2024 a proposed mission called Carbon-I, co-led by Carnegie’s Anna Michalak and Caltech’s Christian Frankenberg was selected as a finalist as part of NASA’s Earth System Explorer program. And in October of 2024, a joint Carnegie-Caltech project was selected to receive seed funding as part of the Carnegie Science Venture Grant program. 

These individual collaborations will be bolstered by Carnegie Science and Caltech’s strategic research alliance, which was formalized in July 2023. The intention to pursue an expanded partnership between these two elite research organizations was first announced in March 2020 and developed over the interim period as Carnegie prepared to relocate its life and environmental scientists to Pasadena.

From their new home base, Carnegie scientists with expertise that spans from genomes to ecosystems to planet-scale dynamics—will be able to address some of the most significant challenges facing humankind today—including climate change, global hunger, sustainable energy, and biodiversity loss.

The Pasadena location will also enable Carnegie to expand upon existing research partnerships with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Garden, and other Southern California-based universities research institutes, making a powerful contribution to Los Angeles’ robust intellectual ecosystem.