The Watson Lectures

collage of watson 2024-25 season speakers

For more than 100 years, the Watson Lectures have brought the wonder of Caltech research and discovery to the public.

Jump to: Upcoming Lectures • Past Lectures

Join a Community of Curiosity!

Caltech welcomes you to the Watsons, an engaging lecture series in Beckman Auditorium, where you will hear from scientists and engineers on the forefront of discovery who are expanding knowledge, tackling society's most pressing challenges, and inventing the technologies of the future.

Free and open to the public, the Earnest C. Watson Lecture Series offers a unique and accessible opportunity to learn more about cutting-edge science directly from Caltech's premier researchers. Come early to mingle with your neighbors over food, drink and music, as well as interactive displays related to the evening's topic. Then head inside to hear a stimulating talk and stay to ask your burning questions.

A recording or each live event will be made available on our Youtube channel.

Evening Schedule

6 p.m. — Activities and music. Food, drinks, and books available for purchase.7:00 p.m. — Doors open7:30 p.m. — Talk and Q&A8:30 p.m. — Post-talk coffee and tea

Upcoming Lectures

May 28, 2025 7:30 pm

Watson Lecture - Tracy Drain: Europa Clipper - The Adventure Begins!

Beckman Auditorium

A Legacy of Sharing Science with the Community

The Earnest C. Watson Lecture Series began in 1922. Originally known as the "Friday Evening Demonstration Lectures," the series was started by Earnest C. Watson, a professor of physics at Caltech from 1919 to 1959, in order to share modern scientific advances with the public and foster a greater appreciation for the impact of fundamental research. For the talks, Watson would stand in front of a packed lecture hall to deliver his famed "liquid-air" demonstration, in which he would open a bottle of air that had been cooled to minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit, and the contents would appear to "boil" out of the bottle and engulf Watson in white fumes. While Watson's famed demonstrations would no longer meet current safety guidelines, the spirit of his talks and his interest in inspiring an appreciation and understanding of science remains and has motivated generations of faculty to share the details of their work.

Eventually renamed in his honor, the Watson Lectures continue to spotlight pathbreaking Caltech research.

Read more about the legacy of Earnest C. Watson here.

Explore Past Lectures

The Secret Life of Superbugs - Smruthi Karthikeyan

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR), a growing global health crisis, is driven not only by clinical misuse of antibiotics but also by widespread reservoirs of resistance genes within environmental microbial communities. So far, almost all antibiotic classes used by doctors have been met by resistance from at least some of the infection-causing pathogens they aim to fight. This indicates that external environments already harbor resistance factors for all developed antibiotics. While researchers who study drug-resistant pathogens have historically focused on hospitals and healthcare settings, antibiotic resistance genes are present in a wide range of environments, including the human gut, wastewater, and natural ecosystems with no prior history of human influence. These environmental sources can serve as reservoirs for resistance genes, which can in turn be acquired by pathogens, accelerating the spread of multidrug resistance and complicating treatment strategies. In this talk, Smruthi Karthikeyan, Gordon and Carol Treweek Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering and William H. Hurt Scholar, will discuss how antimicrobial resistance genes can "jump" across species in natural microbial communities, and how looking at our sewers can provide clues for developing therapeutics to combat the AMR crisis.

How Technology Shaped the Movies (and How the Movies Shaped Technology)

In a public talk called "How Technology Shaped the Movies (and How Movies Shaped Technology)," Jacobson explores how early cinema technologies required materials—such as coal, oil, metals, and chemicals—that had to be extracted from the earth along with massive amounts of water and electricity. At the same time, Hollywood films developed storylines and set pieces around the mining, transport, and fabrication of resources like petroleum and minerals to project certain ideas about extractive industries on the screen. "Many of my questions about Hollywood these days have to do with sustainability and the environmental effects of the industry," says Jacobson. His recently published book, The Cinema of Extractions: Film Materials and Their Forms, traces the inextricable connections between extractive industries and cinema, giving readers new ways to understand films in light of the materials and processes out of which they are created. "I want people to be conscious of the ways that industry uses culture to shape the way we think and to be critical about the culture that is made by industry. I want us to pause for a moment to think about the messages that we're being taught and the ways that we're being taught to live."

The Hidden Poetry of the Genome - Rob Phillips

One of the greatest achievements of the human mind is that, through sequences of symbols, we can represent incredibly complicated concepts, facts, feelings, and ideas. With the 26 letters in the English alphabet alone, our libraries are filled with words that can make us laugh or cry and call us to action. Strings of 0s and 1s are the language of the devices we now can no longer live without. A lucky subset of us find equally moving collections of mathematical symbols. The latest entries into this collection of symbols are the famed A, C, G, and T letters that make up the iconic DNA double helix. A whopping 10^17, of these As, Cs, Gs, and Ts have been deposited on NIH databases. Nonetheless, there is so much we don't know about their hidden meaning. In this talk, Rob Phillips, the Fred and Nancy Morris Professor of Biophysics, Biology, and Physics, will describe the efforts of modern science to decipher this genomic Rosetta Stone. Though we can read and write DNA nearly at will, because of our lack of understanding of its real grammar, we are still unable to see its most meaningful hidden poetry. Phillips's talk will show how we are engaged in an experimental and theoretical mission to find the rules of that hidden poetry.

The Science of Post-Wildfire Debris Flows - Michael Lamb

Los Angeles is devastated by the January 2025 fires. As we enter the rainy season, the threat for debris flows is high in the steep, burned hills that border many communities. Debris flows are fast-moving torrents of water, mud, and rocks that are dangerous to life and property. Known as the fire-flood cycle, this cascade of disasters has plagued California communities for more than a century. In this talk, Michael Lamb, professor of geology, discusses his team's latest research on debris flows, why they often occur after fires, and what can be done to forecast their impact.

Our universe is shaped by the struggle of forces between matter and the attraction of gravity that brings matter together. In the case of neutron stars, matter puts up the ultimate defense, as gravity crushes matter down to densities that exceed those of atomic nuclei. Such neutron stars pack more mass than our Sun down to a size no bigger than Los Angeles. At even further extremes, gravity will lead to the total demise of matter, collapsing everything into a black hole. Yet, at the same time, gravity also provides the means to study such extreme objects as neutron stars and black holes: gravitational waves, "ripples" in space-time that are emitted when neutron stars and black holes collide while traveling at a fraction of the speed of light. Katerina Chatziioannou, assistant professor of physics and William H. Hurt Scholar, describes how researchers track collisions of neutron stars and black holes with gravitational waves, and what we are learning about the universe's most extreme objects.

While we are no strangers to pandemics, medicine is ill-prepared for the rapid increase in bacterial infections that cannot be treated. To prevent the return to the era before penicillin, we must develop new strategies for killing pathogenic bacteria. One option is to harness bacteria's oldest enemy, the viruses known as phages. In this talk, Bil Clemons, the Arthur and Marian Hanisch Memorial Professor of Biochemistry, shares his lab's work to understand the methods some phages have evolved to kill bacteria. He explains how this work can be leveraged for new therapies and new biological tools. Clemons is also the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's science program officer for diversity, equity, and inclusion in science.

Watch more past Watson Lectures on Caltech's YouTube channel.