The awards are still rolling in for scientists on the LIGO team nearly a year after they observed ripples in the fabric of spacetime, called gravitational waves, for the first time in history, confirming Albert Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity.
Gabriela González, a professor in LSU’s Department of Physics & Astronomy, has been named one of the recipients of the National Academy of Sciences 2017 Award for Scientific Discovery, LSU has announced.
González is the current elected spokesperson for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, Scientific Collaboration, which includes the work of 90 institutions and more than 1,000 researchers worldwide. In December, she was named one of the top 10 scientists in the world by the scientific journal Nature.
The National Academy of Sciences presents the Award for Scientific Discovery every two years to recognize a scientific accomplishment and discovery that has a significant impact in the field of astronomy, biochemistry, biophysics, chemistry, materials science or physics. The award is presented with a medal, a $50,000 cash prize and $50,000 to support the recipient’s research.
González will share her latest award with David Howard Reitze, a University of Florida professor and executive director of the LIGO Laboratory at California Institute of Technology, and with Peter R. Saulson, Martin A. Pomerantz ’37 Professor of Physics at Syracuse University.
González and the LIGO collaboration also are the recipients of the 2017 Rossi Prize from the AAS High Energy Astrophysics Division. The prize includes an engraved certificate and a $1,500 award.
“The discovery of gravitational waves is a scientific milestone that took a large group of people working very hard for decades,” González says in a prepared statement. “This is, however, just the beginning. We have opened the field of gravitational-wave astronomy, and we’ll learn about distortions in spacetime produced by cataclysmic events, even if they are dark in the electromagnetic spectrum.”
In December, the LIGO discovery earned the breakthrough honor from the scientific journal Science.
