# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/barry-barish
# Generated: 2026-09-02T06:04:32.606Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/barry-barish"
name: "Barry Barish"
slug: "barry-barish"
description: "The experimental physicist who led LIGO through the engineering grind that finally caught a gravitational wave—Einstein's ripples in spacetime, predicted a century earlier but never directly seen until 2015."
tagline: "American physicist"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/05-0367-92D.hr.jpg"
gender: "male"
country:
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profileType:
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  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1936-01-27"
livingStatus: "LIVING"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Barry Clark Barish was born January 27, 1936, and built his career at Caltech, where he became Linde Professor of Physics. He took the helm of LIGO and drove the detector from concept to working instrument, unsure whether the effort would succeed or collapse. In 2017, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Rainer Weiss and Kip Thorne for the observation of gravitational waves. A year later he joined UC Riverside, the university's second Nobel laureate on faculty, then moved to Stony Brook in 2023 as inaugural President's Distinguished Endowed Chair in Physics. That same year President Biden awarded him the National Medal of Science at the White House.