I am pleased to announce that the Gravitational Wave International Committee (GWIC) Thesis Prize for 2010 is awarded to Haixing Miao from the University of Western Australia, for his thesis “Exploring Macroscopic Quantum Mechanics in Optomechanical Devices”. We hope that we will be able to give Haixing his award at the Amaldi9 meeting in Cardiff.
This year, we again set a record for the number of nominations: seventeen theses from six countries. Moreover, with this award, Australia becomes the fourth continent to host a winner in the five year history of the GWIC Thesis Prize, demonstrating in the clearest fashion the truly global nature of gravitational wave research.
The nominees and their theses can be found at https://gwic.ligo.org/thesisprize/
We are most grateful to chair Viviana Fafone and the Selection Committee (Duncan Brown, Chris van den Broeck, Neil Cornish, Andreas Freise, Dick Manchester, Masa-Katsu Fujimoto, and Peter Shawhan) for their hard work.