A Fan of Caltech Over the coming weeks, we’ll be highlighting
several undergraduates and their summer research at Caltech.
Some are Techers; others hail from schools across the country.
Most are participating in the Summer Undergraduate Research
Fellowships (SURF) program, a unique opportunity for
undergraduates to spend 10 weeks over the summer doing original
research with Caltech faculty. At the end of the project,
students write a paper and present their work at SURF Seminar
Day, which will take place on October 15 this year. When summer
started, Caltech senior Yuyang Fan was handed a picture taken
with a cell phone. The image showed a large box with an array of
small fans covering one side. It was a wind tunnel—a simple one,
but a wind tunnel nevertheless. Fan's mission? To build one
himself as part of his SURF project. And the catch? Other than
the picture, he was given nothing. "That's all the information I
got," he says. It turns out that building a wind tunnel wasn't
even the SURF project he had signe