University of Maryland Physics Professor, Peter Shawhan, BA '90, has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He was cited for the “development of techniques and algorithms to search LIGO data for transient signals, and for realizing the important future scientific implications of gravitational wave observations by looking for other signals developed by electromagnetic observations.”
Shawhan’s primary research for the past 20 years has been direct detection of gravitational waves with the LIGO and Virgo detectors, and he has held numerous leadership positions within the LIGO Scientific Collaboration
Shawhan earned his bachelor’s degree in physics from Washington University in St. Louis in 1990, graduating Summa Cum Laude. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago, and was appointed a Millikan Prize Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology. He joined the University of Maryland Department of Physics in 2006.
He also received the 2018 Kirwan Faculty Research and Scholarship Prize from the University of Maryland in 2018. The prize recognizes a faculty member for a highly significant work of research, scholarship or artistic creativity completed within the last three years.
