The University of Glasgow’s School of Physics and Astronomy (www.gla.ac.uk) has received a bequest of £500,000 from the family of a pioneering Scottish physicist, to fund a scholarship in his name.

Ronald Drever, who passed away in March last year, played a key role in establishing gravitational wave research at the university before moving to the USA in the 1980s to co-found the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) project.

His work helped to lay some of the foundations for the historic first detection of gravitational waves in September 2015 — a century after their existence was first proposed by Albert Einstein.

The University of Glasgow anticipates that the new Professor Ronald Drever Scholarship in Physics and Astronomy will fund one postgraduate position at its Institute for Gravitational Research each year in perpetuity.