AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
SKETCH
CLIFFORD M. WILL
Clifford Will is the
James S. McDonnell Professor of Physics, and member of the McDonnell Center
for the Space Sciences at Washington University in St.
Louis. Born in Hamilton,
Canada in 1946, he received
a B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics from McMaster University
in 1968, and a Ph.D. in Physics from the California Institute of Technology in
1971. He was an Enrico Fermi Fellow at the University of Chicago
(1972-74), and an Assistant Professor of Physics at Stanford University
(1974-81), from 1975 to 1979, he was an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow. In
1981 he joined Washington
University as Associate
Professor, in 1985 became Full Professor of Physics, from 1991 - 1996 and 1997
- 2002 served as Chairman of the Department, and in 2005 was named McDonnell
Professor.
In 1986 he was
selected by the American Association of Physics Teachers to be the 46th
annual Richtmyer Memorial Lecturer. He was elected a Fellow of the American
Physical Society in 1989 and of the American
Academy of Arts and
Sciences in 2002. In recognition of his theoretical work related to the
Hulse-Taylor Binary Pulsar, he was an invited guest of the Nobel Foundation at
the 1993 Nobel Prize Ceremonies honoring discoverers Joseph Taylor and Russell
Hulse. During 1996-97, he was both a J. William Fulbright Fellow and a
Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, and in 1996, he was named Distinguished Alumnus in
the Sciences by McMaster
University. In 2004 he
received the Fellows Award of the St. Louis Academy of Sciences, and was
elected President of the International Society on General Relativity and
Gravitation.
He has published over
160 scientific articles, including 13 major review articles, 26 popular or
semi-popular articles, and two books: Theory and Experiment in Gravitational Physics
(Cambridge University Press, 1981; 2nd Edition, 1993), and Was Einstein Right? (Basic
Books, 1986; 2nd Edition, 1993). Was Einstein Right? was selected one of the 200
best books of 1986 by the New York Times Book Review, and won the 1987 American
Institute of Physics Science-Writing Award in Physics and Astronomy. It has
been translated into French, German, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese,
Korean, Greek, Chinese and Persian. His research interests include tests of
general relativity, gravitational radiation, black holes, cosmology, and the
physics of curved spacetime.
PEP Word Year of Physics Page
Clifford Will Public Lecture