About 500 college students worked 10-week internships at Jet Propulsion Laboratory during summer 2026, tackling everything from extreme weather to Mars rovers to the chemistry of distant planets.
Thirty-eight of them were Caltech undergraduates, according to a Caltech Magazine profile published Aug. 14. Across the full 2025–26 academic year, Caltech was JPL's top feeder school for interns. Another 179 students from universities nationwide participated through Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships or the JPL Summer Internship Program, both administered by Caltech's Student-Faculty Programs office.
The pipeline between Pasadena's two most prominent research institutions is older than NASA itself. Caltech students conducted rocketry experiments in the Arroyo Seco more than two decades before NASA existed, leading to Caltech's founding of JPL in 1936. JPL is still managed by Caltech for NASA.
Caltech formalized its undergraduate research culture in 1979 with the SURF program, which started with 18 students and 17 faculty mentors. The founding idea: undergraduates would propose and pursue their own projects, not simply assist established researchers.
What interns worked on
Tatyana McVay, a Caltech physics undergraduate who normally studies polyatomic molecules with applications in quantum computing, pivoted during her summer 2026 internship to researching extreme weather at JPL. Her interest in storm science traces to her family losing their Georgia home to a tornado when she was a child.
"At most places, you can't really exercise your skills in new fields," McVay told Caltech Magazine. "You can only really do that at places that allow you to explore."
Riddhi Sadhanala, another Caltech undergraduate, spent her internship studying how carcinogens can be removed from the atmosphere through reactions with hydroxyl radicals under different temperature conditions. The work connects to the heavily industrialized Louisiana region sometimes called "Cancer Alley."
Alana Nisperos, a Caltech chemist, studied how clouds and aerosols form in planetary atmospheres, research that bears on why Earth developed conditions for life while Venus did not.
From busboy to professor
Nick Hutzler, now a Caltech professor of physics, credits a SURF internship at JPL with changing his trajectory from math student to scientist. He told Caltech Magazine that the summer before his JPL internship, he was working as a busboy.
The program's alumni roster includes Amit Kshatriya, a 1998 SURF intern who became NASA's associate administrator and highest-ranking civil servant; Charles Elachi, who joined JPL as a student intern in 1970 and directed the laboratory from 2001 to 2016, overseeing the introduction of Mars rovers; and NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins, who completed several JPL internships as a UCLA graduate student before contributing to the Curiosity and Perseverance rover missions.
What's next
JPL is celebrating its 90th year in 2026 and will host a public open house Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 10–11, from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., according to the Pasadena Star-News. Free tickets, limited to five per person, become available Aug. 29 on a first-come, first-served basis through JPL's website.
