Resnick Sustainability Center Highlights Campus-Wide Focus on Pressing Global Issues

As a new academic year gets underway at Caltech, part of the excitement on campus centers around the opening of the Institute's newest building: the Resnick Sustainability Center (RSC), which has been five years in the making. Located on the western edge of campus along Wilson Avenue, the striking four-story building will serve as a defining component of a major sustainability thrust at Caltech and strives to do something truly unique—to bring the entire campus together to address the warming planet's most pressing problems related to energy and resource utilization.

Energized by an unprecedented $750 million gift from Lynda and Stewart Resnick, through their foundation and The Wonderful Company, the campus-wide sustainability endeavor will provide Caltech scientists and engineers with the facilities, tools, and resources they need, as well as teaching laboratories and common meeting spaces, to foster breakthrough ideas and technologies that will help sustain life on Earth.

"It's a truly exciting new hub for bringing the sustainability mission together on campus from all divisions, incorporating both research and education, and bringing our undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and staff scientists together in common cause in one space. That's a new approach," says Jonas Peters, Bren Professor of Chemistry and director of the Resnick Sustainability Institute, which was established in 2009 with a gift from the Resnicks and a matching gift from Gordon and Betty Moore.

The RSC will play a key role within that larger endeavor, serving as both a sustainability research gateway for faculty, staff, and students, as well as a physical gateway for pedestrians on campus.

"This opening marks a new beginning rooted in our shared determination to leave people and the planet better than we found them. By bringing together some of the world's brightest minds to advance science-based solutions, this new center will be a force for driving innovation and hope that humanity can rise to the great existential challenge of our lifetime," shared Stewart. "Lynda and I are honored to contribute to this essential work. We have every confidence Caltech will continue to lead in developing breakthrough solutions that make good on our duty to leave a sustainable world for future generations."

Unlike other labs on campus, the roughly 80,000-square-foot RSC does not house the offices and laboratories of individual faculty members and their groups. Instead, it is home to four research centers with specialized equipment and state-of-the-art facilities that will pull researchers from across campus and JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA, enabling them to imagine and conduct transformational research that can impact sustainability.

Meanwhile, the second floor of the building invests in the campus's educational mission. It houses the undergraduate chemistry laboratories and additional classroom and lab spaces to be used for courses related to sustainability.

"Every undergraduate student who matriculates at Caltech will not only learn about sustainability science and engineering in state-of-the art-laboratories in a stunning building, but they will be embedded in a research environment, seeing how their education can be translated into solutions for the future," says Caltech President Thomas F. Rosenbaum, the Sonja and William Davidow Presidential Chair and professor of physics.

The building was designed by the Yazdani Studio of CannonDesign in consultation with the RSI Building Committee, which guided and supported the design and development of the project since its inception in 2019. The committee, chaired by Sarah Reisman, Bren Professor of Chemistry and the Norman Davidson Leadership Chair of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, included members of the faculty and staff with diverse sets of expertise and knowledge from across Caltech's divisions to help ensure that the completed center would serve the needs of all its future users.

"One of the exciting things about the way the RSC is set up is that it allows people to move into new research areas in sustainability without necessarily having to have all of that initial infrastructure," Reisman says. "We wanted the building to serve as that connective scientific hub. Beyond that, it is also a beautiful connecting piece between the southern and northern parts of campus. We now have this line of sight from the Norman W. Church Laboratory for Chemical Biology, through the RSC breezeway, all the way up to the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Neuroscience Research Building, so it's a new artery along this western part of campus."

True to its name and purpose, the RSC is on track to achieve LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum certification, the highest ranking in the green building rating system. This certification recognizes the building's excellence in six key areas: sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources, indoor environmental quality, and innovation in design.

The RSC incorporates numerous advanced sustainability features, including but not limited to a high-performance exterior envelope, a fully glazed north atrium and western façade that maximizes natural light, solar shading fins that reduce heat gain, the incorporation of highly energy-efficient mechanical and electrical systems, and a striking mass timber frame that lowers embodied carbon. Outside, rooftop photovoltaic arrays generate power for research and operations, while native plantings and stormwater drywells increase the building's sustainability.

"These are just a few of the many features that demonstrate the RSC's commitment to sustainability as it continues to work toward achieving LEED Platinum certification," says Eugene Kim, team lead for the project from Planning, Design and Construction at Caltech.

A Gateway to Sustainability Research

At the core of the RSC is its ability to support sustainability research. The space has been designed flexibly so that it can respond to changing projects and priorities over time, but the building opens with four initial research centers:

- The Solar Science and Catalysis Center (SSCC) is a facility dedicated to directing the energy found in sunlight to produce the molecules that make up the physical world. This involves the design and synthesis of new materials that can more effectively harness solar energy and catalyze the reactions needed to make useful molecules, beginning with ubiquitous resources such as air and water. Most of the SSCC is located on the building's top floor; it also utilizes a solar rooftop, where photovoltaic devices can be tested under real-world conditions.

- The Remote Sensing Center (RSC) is designed to enable the development of new remote-sensing technologies that could be deployed on small satellites or used to collect measurements on Earth. The RSC will also help develop tools to better analyze and understand climate and environmental data. The Brinson Exploration Hub, which is designed to fuel space exploration and the development of technologies on a shorter timescale, will also be partially housed in the RSC, making use of its high bay and field instrumentation room on the basement level, along with a control and data analysis room for various flight projects on the first floor.

- The Ecology and Biosphere Engineering Facility (EBEF) will focus on developing novel ways to isolate, cultivate, and otherwise study a diversity of microorganisms at different scales. State-of-the-art molecular biology laboratories and instrumentation for the EBEF are located on the basement level.

- The Translational Science and Engineering Facility (TSEF) is a unique space where Caltech scientists, engineers, and their collaborators can develop early-stage sustainability technologies and move them toward proof-of-concept demonstrations. The TSEF space includes a high bay, a maker-workroom space, and several labs on the basement and first floors.

A Gateway to Sustainability Education

Since all Caltech undergraduate students are required to take an introductory chemistry lab (either Chem 3a or Chem 3x) sometime during their first two years, all members of the class of 2028 will have a lab course in the new building. Students are already helping to launch the new space and, as the year progresses, will be surrounded by innovations in sustainability research.

During the first week of classes, students were oriented to the new space, went over safety protocols, and started their first lab projects of the term under the guidance of several teaching assistants and Jeff Mendez, a lecturer in chemistry who directs the teaching labs.

"The lab facilities have all been upgraded," says Mendez. The lab spaces were painstakingly planned out, largely during the global pandemic, to meet the needs of a variety of lab courses—not only chemistry. Flooded with natural light and outfitted with dozens of fume hoods and such convenient features as glass walls for writing on and built in projectors and screens, the labs are modern, roomy, and well stocked.

"I am just in shock," said Bella Kedikian, a sophomore who is a teaching assistant for Chem 3a this term. "Everyone has their own space and professional tools and supplies. This is a complete change."

"Being able to work in a new facility like this is really cool and interesting, especially because everything is brand new—from the materials to the facility," said Grace Wilson, a senior taking Chem8 (Procedures of Synthetic Chemistry for Premedical Students).

"It's very Caltech that we are prioritizing our undergraduate students being immersed in a research-intensive center that is our flagship building for research in sustainability," Peters says. "We want them integrated into this kind of thinking from day one."

Likewise, many Caltech courses have been or are being reworked to integrate sustainability concepts and to equip students with both the awareness and the foundational toolset needed to address the challenges posed by climate change and the planet's limited resources.

The RSC's educational spaces have been intentionally designed to meet student needs for this kind of learning. In planning for and designing the second floor, an education committee chaired by Jess Adkins, Smits Family Professor of Geochemistry and Global Environmental Science; and Theo Agapie, the John Stauffer Professor of Chemistry and executive officer for chemistry, studied the needs on campus, and in particular within sustainability education.

Along with the glistening new undergraduate labs, the RSC also includes two active-learning classrooms, designed in consultation with experts from Caltech's Center for Teaching, Learning, and Outreach, which include a retractable wall for easy conversion to one larger classroom. Multiple projectors, students seated in groups, and rolling podiums are some of the features integrated into these rooms made for active learning.

"I don't think you'll find a building quite like it, one that pulls so many dimensions of a campus under one roof," Peters says. "In the true Caltech spirit, it will be an experiment. It's been wonderful how many people were willing to roll up their sleeves as stakeholders to make this possible for the campus, and I think Caltech's intimate environment will make it a success."

The RSC building has already been recognized with numerous awards, including an American Institute of Architects (AIA) Pasadena & Foothill Design Merit Award (2023), an International Architecture Award (2023), a Southern California Development Forum Design Award (2022), Fast Company's Innovation by Design Award (2022), and AIA's Next LA Honor Award (2021).