I worked on LIGO as a graduate student, where I had the privilege of interacting with Rai Weiss. He is a role model for us all: brilliant, hard-working, and hu

I worked on LIGO as a graduate student, where I had the privilege of interacting with Rai Weiss. He is a role model for us all: brilliant, hard-working, and human. After he retired from his teaching duties at MIT, he could often be found late at night in the electronics shop of our Louisiana lab, working to eek out a little more sensitivity in the detector, a half decibel by a half decibel. As a graduate student, I appreciated his sincere concern and advocacy for our dissertation work. He also has wonderful stories from a long career in physics: inventing atomic clocks, launching balloons to map out the cosmic microwave background radiation, being pitched the proposed Space Shuttle program by Werner von Braun himself, serving on the JASON committee... He is probably too modest to write an autobiography, but it would be a captivating tale.