I photographed Ray Jayawardhana at Caltech, where he recently became the Institute’s tenth president. But the part of his story I keep returning to happened decades earlier, in Sri Lanka, when he was a boy waiting for the mail.
In the 1980s, Ray typed a letter on a pale blue aerogramme and sent it to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. He wanted photographs from the Voyager missions. For weeks, he hurried home from school to see if anyone had answered. Eventually, a large manila envelope arrived bearing the JPL logo. Inside was a book of photographs of Jupiter and Saturn, their moons and rings. He remembered holding it and feeling that he could somehow participate in this exploration, even from so far away.
As a photographer, I find that difficult to forget. Someone opened a letter from a child they had never met. Someone put a book in an envelope. The photographs traveled back across the world, carrying evidence of places stranger than anything the boy could have seen outside his window. Years of engineering and patient observation had made those pictures possible. Mailing them gave that work another life.
His fascination with space had begun even earlier. When Ray was about four, his father pointed to the Moon from their garden in southern Sri Lanka and told him that people had walked there. The thought astonished him. Before he understood the science, he understood the adventure. Human beings had found a way to reach that distant thing in the sky. What else might be possible?
Ray eventually followed those questions to Yale and then Harvard, where he earned his doctorate in astronomy. His research investigates how planets and planetary systems form and evolve. He studies brown dwarfs, objects that occupy the territory between planets and stars, and uses observations of distant planetary atmospheres to help investigate the possibilities for life elsewhere. He is also a member of the science team for the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRISS instrument. The boy asking for pictures became a scientist helping to interpret the light arriving from other worlds.
There is something deeply human about that progression. Astronomy requires us to work with what reaches us. We cannot hold an exoplanet in our hands. We collect its light, separate it, question it, and try to understand what could have produced it. The distances are almost impossible to comprehend. The work itself depends on particular people paying very close attention.
Ray has also spent much of his career writing for people outside his field. Alongside his scientific papers are books and essays intended to make discovery accessible to a wider audience. Before coming to Caltech, he served as provost of Johns Hopkins and as dean of Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences. He began his Caltech presidency on July 1, 2026, and will continue his astronomical research.
Now he leads the institution that manages JPL for NASA. His responsibilities include helping sustain the people and research that will produce the next photographs, the next discoveries, the next reason for a child somewhere to look up.
A life has come full circle, though I suspect it feels less tidy from inside it. There were years of study and decisions no childhood letter could have anticipated. Still, the connection is there. A boy in Sri Lanka asked to see farther. Someone answered him.
I like thinking about that envelope. And about the children who will receive whatever comes next.
