Professor Will is a member of the Washington University Gravitation Group (WUGRAV). With his post-doctoral fellows and students, he studies the observable aspects of general relativity. A central current thrust is to calculate the gravitational radiation from inspiralling and merging binary systems of compact objects (neutron stars or black holes). These are the most promising sources of gravitational waves detectable by large-scale laser-interferometric gravitational-wave observatories, such as the LIGO observatories in the USA and the proposed space interferometer, LISA. Important astronomical information can be extracted from the detected signals by comparing them against theoretical "template" waveforms that have been calculated to high precision using general relativity. For the inspiral phase, we are calculating the waveforms using high-order versions of the "post-Newtonian" approximation to general relativity. We are also studying the effects of the spin of the compact objects on the inspiral orbits and the gravitational-wave signal.

Other topics of interest include testing alternative theories of gravity using gravitational-wave observations; detectability of the quasinormal "ringdown" gravitational waves emitted by newly formed supermassive black holes; calculation of the recoil velocity of massive black holes formed by the merger of two black holes, and development of tools to analyse the interface between post-Newtonian techniques and numerical general relativity.

Dr. Clifford M. Will's Publications

Clifford Will received a B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics from McMaster University in 1968, and a Ph.D. in Physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1971. He was an Enrico Fermi Fellow at the University of Chicago (1972-74), and an Assistant Professor of Physics at Stanford University (1974-81). From 1975 to 1979, he was an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow. In 1981 he joined Washington University as Associate Professor, and in 1985 became Full Professor of Physics. He was Chairman of the Department from 1991-1996 and 1997-2002, and was named James S. McDonnell Professor in 2005.

In 1986 he was selected by the American Association of Physics Teachers to be the 46th annual Richtmyer Memorial Lecturer, and in 1989 was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society. During 1996-97, he was both a J. William Fulbright Fellow and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, and in 1996, he was named Distinguished Alumnus in the Sciences by McMaster University. In 2002, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2007 he was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences. In 2004, he received the Fellows Award from the St. Louis Academy of Sciences. In 2005, in recognition of the World Year of Physics, he carried out a 4-week, 21-city National Public Lecture Tour of Canada, sponsored by the Canadian Association of Physicists.

He has published over 160 scientific articles or abstracts, including 13 major review articles, 26 popular or semi-popular articles, and two books: Theory and Experiment in Gravitational Physics (Cambridge University Press; 2nd Edition, 1993), and Was Einstein Right? (Basic Books; 2nd Edition, 1993). Was Einstein Right? was selected one of the 200 best books of 1986 by the New York Times Book Review, and won the 1987 American Institute of Physics Science-Writing Award in Physics and Astronomy. It has been translated into French, German, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Greek, Persian, and Chinese.