Caltech’s 2025 Distinguished Alumni Award Recipients Celebrated

Each year, the Institute awards its highest honor for alumni—the Distinguished Alumni Award—to those individuals who, because of both personal commitment and professional contributions, have made remarkable impacts in a field, on the community, or in society more broadly.

The 2025 class of DAAs—first announced this year at Caltech’s 88th Annual Seminar Day on May 17—are Deborah D.L. Chung (BS ’73, MS ’73), Athanassios Fokas (PhD ’79), F. William Studier (PhD ’63), and Donald Truhlar (PhD ’70).

“The Distinguished Award recipients have leveraged their Caltech educations to illuminate the mysteries of nature and to apply their insights for the good of society,” says Caltech President Thomas F. Rosenbaum, the Sonja and William Davidow Presidential Chair and professor of physics. “The interests of the 2025 class range across the disciplines, exemplifying Caltech’s approach to research and the extraordinary power created when basic discovery is paired with a clear vision of the future.”

Deborah D.L. Chung (BS ’73, MS ’73), the SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University at Buffalo is honored for her research that helped launch the field of multifunctional structural materials; for her contributions to the development of smart concrete and other nanostructured materials with intrinsic capabilities potentially useful to society; and for her stalwart efforts to diversify science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Chung is an internationally recognized materials scientist considered preeminent in a subdiscipline known as multifunctional structural materials, which was propelled by her invention of self-sensing smart concrete. She has created nanostructured materials that shield from electromagnetic interference, thermal interface materials for microelectronic cooling, and structural materials that can act as electrical capacitors.

She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received the University at Buffalo President’s Medal, that institution’s highest honor.

Chung is also known for her efforts to diversify STEM through her personal work, outreach, and philanthropy, and was a member of the first class of women who, in 1973, earned undergraduate degrees from Caltech.

Athanassios Fokas (PhD ’79), professor Emeritus of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, is honored for his contributions spanning science, medicine, and the arts, including advances in partial differential equations, mathematical physics, the life sciences, and nuclear imaging for diagnosis and discovery, and for his work explaining and enlivening science and mathematics for the public.

Fokas’s contributions span the disciplines. Among the most cited mathematicians, he joined with colleagues to solve all key open problems in the algebraic analysis of integrable nonlinear partial differential equations; invented a transform method that bears his name and is used in mathematical physics; and advanced asymptotic methods, including some applicable to problems in general relativity. His algorithms have improved nuclear imaging for diagnosis and have been used to create the most complete description of currents in the brain. His broader contributions to biomedical science include models of leukemia dynamics, protein folding, and COVID-19 wave dynamics.

Fokas, a passionate science communicator whose lectures have been attended by thousands, is a member of Greece’s Academy of Athens and a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and the American Mathematical Society. He has received the London Mathematical Society’s Naylor Prize, the European Academy of Science’s Blaise Pascal Medal, and membership in Greece’s Order of the Phoenix.

F. William Studier (PhD ’63), the former group leader for Molecular and Structural Biology at Brookhaven National Laboratory, is honored for the invention of technologies that have helped extend millions of lives through therapies, diagnostics, and vaccines; for his seminal work exploring the genetics and biochemistry of bacteriophage T7; and for his innovative techniques for high-throughput analysis of DNA, RNA, and T7 proteins.

The technologies Studier has developed in molecular biology have helped to extend millions of lives worldwide through their application in therapies, diagnostics, and vaccines, including the mRNA vaccines for COVID-19. His seminal work exploring the genetics and biochemistry of bacteriophage T7 was a forerunner of systems biology. Using that knowledge, he developed a method for the rapid expression of any gene of interest—one of the most widely used and useful systems for biomedical research. He also innovated techniques for high-throughput slab gel electrophoresis that became central to the analysis of DNA, RNA, and T7 proteins.

Studier has received the Department of Energy’s Ernest Orlando Lawrence Memorial Award and the Merkin Prize in Biomedical Technology, and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences as well as a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Donald Truhlar (PhD ’70), Regents Professor and Distinguished University Teaching Professor at the University of Minnesota, is honored for his breakthroughs in theoretical and computational chemistry research, which have earned him a place among the world’s most influential chemists and provided the basis for the first accurate measurements of, or models for, a number of key chemical interactions.

Truhlar conducted the first accurate quantum mechanical calculation of a chemical reaction rate, developed what have become standard methods for rate constant calculations in chemical kinetics; innovated accurate methods for the density functional theory widely used in chemistry and chemical physics; and discovered the most widely used chemical models for free energies of solvation. His multifaceted research seeks to address global challenges in energy and the environment while pushing the boundaries of quantum mechanics.

Truhlar has received numerous honors, including election as a fellow to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the American Chemical Society, and the American Physical Society.