This year, the Western Washington University group will host the Gravitational Wave Astronomy Northwest Meeting. It will take place at the LIGO Hanford Observatory from June 26 to June 28, 2023. June 26 will be a student workshop, with the main meeting following the next two days.

The Gravity Group at Western just received an RUI (Facilitating Research at Primarily Undergraduate Institutions) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to investigate ice formation on cold optical surfaces for cryogenic gravitational wave detectors (see also our research page). The 3-year grant will fund our work on this project, and we are very excited about this important milestone!

It’s been a slow process due to the pandemic and supply chain issues, but now we are finally making progress in terms of setting up the lab! Earlier this year, the optical table was moved in. We are slowly populating the lab with equipment and starting to set up experiments!

Western Washington University’s Gravity Group is now officially a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC). We are looking forward to contributing to exciting new discoveries !