High honor for the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics
The Royal Society awards Bernard Schutz the Rumford Medal
Bernard Schutz is being recognized for his contributions to relativistic astrophysics, the detection of gravitational radiation, and education. He will receive the medal which comes with a £2,000 cash prize on 1 December 2025, during a ceremony at the Royal Society in London.
Bernard Schutz is renowned for his research in general relativity, particularly his contributions to the detection of gravitational waves, and for his textbooks. In the 1980s, his pioneering work laid the foundations for interpreting the data that large detectors such as LIGO and Virgo (which were still just proposals at the time) would gather 30 years later. He showed that gravitational waves could be used to measure distances across the universe and subsequently to calculate its expansion rate — one of the most fundamental quantities in astronomy. He also showed how to extract the weak signals expected from the data, developing methods that are still used today. Schutz's work continued when he moved to Potsdam, where his department brought a significant number of data analysts and supercomputer simulation specialists working in gravitational-wave science into the field.
“I am very honored and humbled to receive this prestigious medal, which is a fantastic recognition of my research,” says Schutz, who is an emeritus professor at Cardiff University. He adds: “Benjamin Thompson was the first person to receive the medal that he had founded. He was awarded the prize for his various discoveries relating to heat and light. It was he who introduced the concept of a standard candle, not originally for astronomy but for conducting quantitative experiments on light. My discovery of how to measure distances to gravitational-wave sources has turned those sources into a new kind of astronomical standard candle. They are now being called standard sirens.”
Bernard Schutz studied physics at Clarkson University in New York, USA, and obtained his PhD from the California Institute of Technology in 1972. After spending 21 years at Cardiff University in Wales, UK, where he was a lecturer, reader, and professor of physics and astronomy, he became one of the founding directors of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Potsdam in 1994. As Director of the Astrophysical Relativity Department, he played a significant role in developing the institute until his retirement in 2014. He is currently an emeritus professor of physics and astronomy at Cardiff University.
Schutz developed important principles for observing the universe with gravitational waves, which led to their direct detection in 2015. In recognition of his contributions to gravitational physics, he has received several awards, including the Amaldi Medal from the Italian Society of General Relativity and Gravitation in 2006, the Eddington Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society in 2019 and the Richard A. Isaacson Award in Gravitational-Wave Science from the American Physical Society in 2020. In 2011, he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Science by the University of Glasgow. He has also been elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Learned Society of Wales, and the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in Uppsala. In 2021, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
The Rumford Medal is awarded by the Royal Society for 'outstanding contributions to physics'. The list of prize winners reads like a who's who of physics over the last 225 years. Among the prize winners are Michael Faraday, Louis Pasteur, Pieter Zeeman, Heinrich Hertz, and Wilhelm Röntgen.
The award is named after the British scientist Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, who is renowned for his contributions to thermodynamics and for establishing the Royal Institution. He endowed the prize in 1796 and was himself awarded the first medal in 1800.
