Patrick Brady, distinguished professor of physics at UWM, has been honored for his work in gravitational-wave science.
Brady, the director of the Leonard E. Parker Center for Gravitation, Cosmology and Astrophysics at UWM, was given the American Physical Society’s 2026 Richard A. Isaacson Award in Gravitational-Wave Science, announced Wednesday.
The award cites Brady’s “trailblazing work in gravitational wave data analysis techniques, computing, and cyberinfrastructure, and for leadership in gravitational wave science that enables multi-messenger astronomy with gravitational wave observations.”
Brady was part of the UWM team that contributed to the groundbreaking first detection of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) in 2015. These ripples in space-time are caused by cosmic collisions of black holes and neutron stars. The discovery confirmed a major prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity and was recognized with the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics.
From 2019 to 2025, Brady served as the elected spokesperson (leader) of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, an international collection of more than 1,400 scientists from 127 institutions in 19 countries. Together with the European Virgo and Japanese KAGRA detectors, LIGO continues to improve its sensitivity and has now measured the waves from more than 300 cosmic collisions.
A decade after the initial discovery, the collaboration achieved another milestone: using a signal from a black hole merger detected in January 2025 (GW250114), the group confirmed Hawking’s area theorem, which predicts that the total area of a black hole’s event horizon can never decrease.
The Isaacson Award is given each year for outstanding contributions in the fields of gravitational-wave physics, gravitational-wave astrophysics and associated technologies, made possible with the support of Kip S. Thorne and Rainer Weiss, two of the 2017 Nobel Prize winners.
