2 June 2016 — Three founders of LIGO are the recipients of the prestigious Kavli Prize in Astrophysics. The Kavli Foundation announced that Ronald W.P. Drever (Caltech), Kip S. Thorne (Caltech) and Rainer Weiss (MIT) are the 2016 awardees of the $1 million prize. The prize, which is awarded every 2 years, recognizes “scientists for their seminal advances in three research areas,” including Astrophysics, Kavli Prize website states. The three founders of LIGO are being honored for “their ingenuity, inspiration, intellectual leadership and tenacity [which] were the driving force behind [the] epic discovery” of gravitational waves, the prize citation reads.
Update 6 Sep 2016: The Kavli Prize was presented to (below, l-r) Ian Drever (representing his brother Ronald); Rainer Weiss; and Kip S. Thorne by Crown Prince of Norway Haakon at a ceremony in Oslo, Norway: