Clifford Martin Will

Clifford Martin Will (born 1946) is a Canadian-born theoretical physicist noted for his contributions to general relativity.

Life and work Will was born in Hamilton, Ontario. In 1968, he earned a B.Sc. from McMaster University. At California Institute of Technology, he studied under Kip Thorne, earning his Ph.D. in 1971. He was an Enrico Fermi postdoctoral fellow under Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar at the University of Chicago and an Assistant Professor at Stanford University, and in 1981 joined the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis. He served 10 years as Chair of Physics (1991 - 2002), and in 2005 was named James S. McDonnell Professor of Space Sciences. In 2012, he moved to a position as Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Florida.

In 1986, the "Committee on Accuracy of Time Transfer in Satellite Systems", chaired by Will, validated the methods being used to incorporate the effects of general and special relativity in the operation of the Global Positioning System (GPS); without these corrections, the system would not function properly.

Honors and awards Will was a Guggenheim Fellow and a J. William Fulbright Fellow for the academic year 1996–1997. From 2009 to 2018, Will was the editor-in-chief of IOP Publishing's journal Classical and Quantum Gravity. and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2007. In 2021 he shared the American Physical Society Einstein Prize with Saul Teukolsky, for "outstanding contributions to observational tests of general relativity with theories of gravitational waves, astrophysical black holes and neutron stars."

Bibliographic information

According to the NASA ADS database, the h-index of Professor Will is 64.

Selected works

(original publication date 1986)