Rate My Professor Neil Cornish

Neil Cornish is Regents Professor of Physics at Montana State University (MSU), where he serves as Director of the eXtreme Gravity Institute in the Department of Physics. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1996 and his M.S. from the University of Melbourne. Cornish has been a faculty member at MSU, leading the university's LIGO Scientific Collaboration group since 2007. His career includes significant contributions to gravitational wave research, including participation in major discoveries such as the first detection of gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger in 2015 and the multi-messenger observation of a binary neutron star merger in 2017. In recent years, he co-led efforts resulting in evidence for low-frequency gravitational waves in 2023, was appointed by NASA to a science team supporting an international space mission in 2024, and leads the observational science component of an international collaboration studying strong gravity announced in 2025. Cornish delivered the Provost's Distinguished Lecture on Extreme Gravity in 2017 and continues to mentor graduate students in gravitational physics.

Cornish's research specializes in gravitational wave astronomy, focusing on binary black hole mergers, neutron star mergers, LIGO observations, and tests of general relativity. His work has profoundly impacted the field, with key publications including GWTC-1: a gravitational-wave transient catalog of compact binary mergers observed by LIGO and Virgo during the first and second observing runs (Physical Review X, 2019), Gravitational waves and gamma-rays from a binary neutron star merger: GW170817 and GRB 170817A (The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2017), GW170817: Measurements of neutron star radii and equation of state (Physical Review Letters, 2018), GW170104: observation of a 50-solar-mass binary black hole coalescence at redshift 0.2 (Physical Review Letters, 2017), and GW150914: Implications for the stochastic gravitational-wave background from binary black holes (Physical Review Letters, 2016). These papers have garnered thousands of citations each. Among his honors are the Montana University System Regents Professor title in 2018, American Physical Society Outstanding Referee in 2021, the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics as part of the LIGO team, and the College of Letters & Science Dean's Award for Meritorious Research and Creativity. His leadership in gravitational physics has advanced MSU's role in international collaborations like LIGO and future observatories.