David Reitze

David Howard Reitze is an American laser physicist who is professor of physics at the University of Florida and served as the scientific spokesman of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) experiment in 2007-2011. In August 2011, he took a leave of absence from the University of Florida to be the Executive Director of LIGO, stationed at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California. He obtained his BA in 1983 from Northwestern University, his PhD in physics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1990, and had positions at Bell Communications Research and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, before taking his faculty position at the University of Florida. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.