Ronald Drever

Ronald William Prest Drever was a Scottish experimental physicist who lived from 1931 to 2017, professor emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, co-founder of the LIGO project and co-inventor of the Pound-Drever-Hall technique for laser stabilisation and the Hughes-Drever experiment. His work was instrumental in the first detection of gravitational waves in September 2015; he died seven months before his colleagues Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish won the Nobel Prize in Physics for that work, and it is widely believed he would have shared the Nobel Prize had he not died before the Nobel Committee own decision. He shared the 2016 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics, with Thorne and Weiss, for the direct detection of gravitational waves.