About Sandra Tsing Loh

Writer/performer/musician/humorist Sandra Tsing Loh, the host of the "Loh Down on Science" was born for this job...it marries her hard-earned bachelor's degree in physics from Caltech in 1983, with her talents for humor and the performing arts.

Loh, who describes herself as being on the short list of candidates for patron saint of those lost at Caltech, was also awarded the Institute's highest honor ever bestowed upon alumni, the Distinguished Alumni Award, in 2001.

Of her college experience, she reminisces, "By the time I graduated, I had a Caltech diploma entirely made of. . . partial credit, yes-- My degree was glued together, faintly pulsing with. . . radioactivity, graded less on a curve than on a kind of wild hyperbola asymptotically approaching. . . some imaginary. . . actual answer."

She was also the first alumna to be a Caltech Commencement speaker in 2005 and received much acclaim from students, faculty, and staff for that address.

In her profession, Loh has offered insightful radio commentary locally and nationally, has written and performed one-woman shows, composes and performs music for film, has created some traffic-stopping performance art.

Loh has a national monthly radio commentary on the public radio business program Marketplace. She has been a regular commentator on NPR's "Morning Edition" and on Ira Glass's "This American Life". She also does a weekly commentary, The Loh Life, that has aired in Southern California on KPCC 89.3 FM since 2004.

Loh has also been a solo performer and writer. Previous one-woman shows include Mother on Fire, performed in Los Angeles in 2005-06; Sugar Plum Fairy, performed in Los Angeles, San Jose, and Seattle in 2004, and I Worry at the Kennedy Center.

She is also a contributing editor to the Atlantic Monthly.

She is the author of the books A Year in Van Nuys, Depth Takes a Holiday: Essays from Lesser Los Angeles, Aliens in America, and If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home By Now. The last was chosen by the LA Times as one on the 100 best fiction books of 1998, and is based on Loh's solo off-Broadway show that ran at Second Stage Theatre in New York in summer 1996. She returned to Second Stage for Bad Sex With Bud Kemp, another solo show, in 1998.

She has won a Pushcart Prize for her short story "My Father's Chinese Wives", which has also been featured in a Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.

She composed and performed on the score for Jessica Yu's 1997 Oscar-winning documentary Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien, and scored Yu's documentary about the Living Museum on HBO.

Loh also has appeared on tour in Aliens in America, her darkly comic semi-autobiographical tale of growing up middle-class Chinese-German in Southern California.

Loh began her career in the mid-1980s as a performance artist. Her piano concert "spectacles" was covered by People magazine, the Wall Street Journal, GQ, Glamour, the Associated Press, CNN, and even in Johnny Carson's Tonight Show monologue. Nearly 1,000 people attended "Night of the Grunion" (March 1989), in which Loh and the Topanga Symphony played a concerto for spawning fish on a Malibu beach at midnight. In "Self Promotion" (March 1988), an assistant flung $1,000 in autographed $1 bills over her as she performed before a stampeding crowd. "Spontaneous Demographics" (September 1987) featured Loh playing piano on the Harbor Freeway in Los Angeles at rush hour.

Loh's family has been associated with Caltech for many years. Her father, Eugene Loh, earned a master's degree in physics in 1953 and a PhD in mechanical engineering in 1954, and her brother Eugene received a bachelor's degree in physics in 1980.

"Caltech is a wonderfully unique academic institution whose legacy, aside from outstanding achievement in science, is a rich cultural history with more than its share of quirks and surprises," says Loh.