[meteorite-list] Moore Foundation Awards Multiple Grants to California Institute of Technology

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri Apr 14 10:35:06 2006
Message-ID: <200604132343.QAA19079_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

Caltech News Release
For Immediate Release
April 13, 2006

Moore Foundation Awards Multiple Grants to California Institute of Technology

PASADENA, Calif.- The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has recently
awarded multimillion dollar grants to the California Institute of
Technology for the establishment of three new projects: the Center
for Geochemical and Cosmochemical Microanalysis, the Proteome
Exploration Laboratory, and the Center for Theoretical Cosmology and
Physics. The grants for these facilities total more than $22 million.

Center for Geochemical and Cosmochemical Microanalysis: The Jet
Propulsion Laboratory and other NASA facilities have collected solar
wind and dust from comet tails during recent missions, and future
plans include samples from Mars and other solar-system bodies. Some
of these samples are smaller than a grain of table salt. To study
such tiny samples, Caltech has received an $8.799 million grant from
the Moore Foundation to create the Center for Geochemical and
Cosmochemical Microanalysis.

The funds will pay for a laboratory housing two secondary-ion mass
spectrometers for analyzing elemental and isotopic abundances at an
extremely small scale, and a facility for developing new instruments
designed to push back the frontiers of analytical geochemistry in the
lab and in the field, whether here on Earth or on other planetary
surfaces.

This facility will be used by a wide range of faculty, including
geochemists, cosmochemists, planetary scientists, and geobiologists
>from Caltech and JPL.

The principal investigator is John Eiler, associate professor of geochemistry.

Proteome Exploration Laboratory: The Moore Foundation has also funded
the Caltech Proteome Exploration Laboratory with a grant of $7.9
million. The lab, together with two other cutting-edge facilities
already in place at Caltech will make the Institute a world leader in
using the most advanced technologies available to identify,
characterize, and evaluate the human genome products that specify the
chemistry of life.

The technologies will allow for research into how the proteins
specified by a genome give rise to an organism. Caltech researchers
will be able to dissect both the structure and function of proteomic
networks that underlie cellular computation.

The principal investigator is Raymond Deshaies, professor of biology;
investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Center for Theoretical Cosmology and Physics: This center, for which
the Moore Foundation has donated $5.6 million, will attack the
problems posed by dark matter, dark energy, and the early universe.
As a think tank, it will be nourished by the wealth of observational
activity in cosmology at Caltech. The program will fund senior
scientists as well as a visitor program, and will prepare
postdoctoral scholars to enter long-term faculty positions. By
analyzing and interpreting observational data in the next decade and
brainstorming ideas for future experimental directions, the center
will advance our understanding of several of the most confounding
questions in fundamental physics today.

The principal investigator is Marc Kamionkowski, professor of physics
and theoretical astrophysics.

"These generous grants will enable the Caltech faculty and their
coworkers to advance human understanding of such basic questions as
what the nature of the universe is and how the chemistry of life
operates," said Provost Paul Jennings.

The gifts are part of the Moore Foundation's $300 million commitment
to the five-year, $1.4 billion fundraising campaign that Caltech
kicked off in October 2002.

Established in September 2000, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
seeks to develop outcome-based projects that will improve the quality
of life for future generations. It has organized the majority of its
grant making around large-scale initiatives. It concentrates funding
in three programs areas: environmental conservation, science, and the
San Francisco Bay Area.

###

Contact: Jill Perry
           (626) 395-3226
           jperry_at_caltech.edu
Received on Thu 13 Apr 2006 07:43:18 PM PDT