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Prof. Sir James Hough

Prof. Sir James Hough

Prof. Sir James Hough

Associate Director of the IGR, Research Professor in Natural Philosophy

ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3242-3123

Publications (Glasgow eprint repository)

Jim Hough is a graduate of the University of Glasgow where he became Professor of Experimental Physics in 1986 and is currently the emeritus holder of the Kelvin Chair of Natural Philosophy, and also a Visiting Professor in Physics at the University of Strathclyde. He was Director of the University's Institute for Gravitational Research from 2000 to 2009 and is now Associate Director.

Research interests are centred on Gravitational Wave Detection on ground (GEO 600 in Germany and Advanced LIGO in the USA) and in space (LISA). A JILA Fellow in 1983 he was, along with Karsten Danzmann, winner of a Max-Planck research prize in 1991, was elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1991 and to the Royal Society of London in 2003, was awarded the Duddell Prize of the Institute of Physics in 2004 and the Gunning Victoria Prize lectureship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2008. He was elected to Fellowship of the Institute of Physics in 1993 and of the American Physical Society in 2001, and was awarded Fellowship of the International Society for General Relativity and Gravitation in 2010, and Fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts in 2012.

For his wide-ranging research and advisory work he was awarded an OBE in the 2013 Queen's Birthday Honours, and following the detection of Gravitational Radiation from coalescing black holes in 2015 he was a awarded a Knighthood in the Queen's Birthday honours 2018.

Following the detection he was awarded a number of prizes including the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the President’s Medal of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Medal of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Gold Medal (A) of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Bakerian Medal and Prize of the Royal Society and the Edison Volta Prize of the European Physical Society.

He has honorary Doctorate of Science Degrees from the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow.

With several hundred refereed journal publications to his name he combines continuing research into the quest for gravitational waves with previously being Chief Executive Officer of the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance (SUPA) and being the initiator and director of the first International Max Planck Partnership worldwide. This partnership, between five Scottish Universities and five Max Planck Institutes in Germany, was centred on Observation and Measurement at the Quantum Limit and was planned to boost the academic and innovative impact of Scottish Physics in the area of quantum measurement and information.

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