Rotation and Thesis Lab Selection

During the first year, students are encouraged to sample the diversity of the research programs at Caltech by spending approximately four months in each of two to three different laboratories. This rotation program exposes students to different research topics, techniques, and styles, and helps students build professional and social contacts with other students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty members within the division. In addition to the rotation program, students become acquainted with the diverse research opportunities at Caltech through a weekly seminar course in which Biology division faculty meet with students to describe the research projects in their labs.

Students typically complete their rotations during the spring quarter of the first year. At this point, students make arrangements to join a specific lab to begin work on their PhD thesis. Although students usually prefer to join a lab that they have rotated in, this is not required. A unique advantage of Caltech's diverse faculty and students is that students do not typically compete with each other to join specific laboratories.

Students in the Biology graduate program are free to do rotations or thesis work in any of the divisions in the Institute. Several of our students are currently engaged in thesis research in the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, which features a group of ten laboratories interested in bio-organic chemistry, strutural biology, and biochemistry. In addition, Biology division graduate students engage in thesis research or collaborate with faculty in physics, environmental engineering science, electrical engineering, and computational and neural systems.