Dr. Bernard Schutz - Class of 1964

Bernard Schutz graduated BHS in 1964.  He was . He went on to Clarkson University and then to Caltech for his Ph.D.  There he was supervised by Kip Thorne, one of last year's Nobelists. He then worked for a year with Stephen Hawking in Cambridge, England, returned to the US for two years at Yale, and then took a lectureship at Cardiff University in Wales.

Bernard Schutz is a leading member of the international team that made the breakthrough first detection of gravitational waves in 2015, verifying Einstein's prediction and opening up a new kind of astronomy. Three of the founders of this project received the Nobel Prize in Physics last year.  He and his family moved from Wales to Germany in 1995, where he helped found the Albert Einstein Institute, which has grown into one of the main centers in the world for gravitational wave research. After retiring from his director position there in 2014, he returned to Wales with a part-time professorship in astrophysics and data science, becoming the first director of Cardiff's Data Innovation Research Institute.

His three daughters were all born in Cardiff in the 1980s, and they are his greatest pride of all!