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Caltech inaugurates its new president in campus ceremony

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Caltech inaugurated its new president Friday: Thomas Rosenbaum, a physicist who was previously provost at the University of Chicago.

The outdoor inauguration ceremony at Beckman Auditorium, complete with a procession of faculty in their academic gowns, marked Rosenbaum’s formal step up to the leadership position at the renowned science and engineering school in Pasadena. He actually took office in July, succeeding Jean-Lou Chameau, who left Caltech last year to head King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.

Rosenbaum, 59, received his bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard University in 1977 and both a master’s and a doctorate in physics from Princeton University in 1979 and 1982, respectively. He worked on research at Bell Labs and IBM Watson Research Center. He is an expert on the quantum mechanical nature of materials that are best observed at temperatures near absolute zero.

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Caltech enrolls 978 undergraduate students and 1,253 graduate students; it has about 300 faculty members and more than 600 research scholars.

For the fourth year in a row, Caltech was recently ranked as the top research university in the world by the Times Higher Education magazine of Great Britain.

Follow me @larrygordonlat

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