Guenakh Mitselmakher

Guenakh Mitselmakher was a Russian-American physicist who passed away on January 28, 2026. He joined the University of Florida in 1995 and, since 2004, he was a Distinguished Professor in the Institute for High Energy Physics and Astrophysics at the University of Florida (UFL). His main interests were in gravitational waves and experimental particle physics.

Career He earned his Ph.D at Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, Russia in 1974.

On September 14, 2015, he contributed to the discovery of GW150914 using his real-time search program Coherent WaveBurst, which identified gravitational wave signals in the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO) data received at detectors in Livingston, Louisiana and Hanford, Washington.

He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2001 "for his early measurement of the pion charge radius and for his leadership role in the design of innovative very high rate muon detectors at hadronic colliders".