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

[Ron Baalke]

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.

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Contact:   Jill Perry
           (626) 395-3226
           jperry at caltech.edu