Mike Cruise

Career Cruise remained at MSSL as a staff researcher; from 1985–1986 he briefly served as its Deputy Director.

In 2011, as part of a collaboration with the Office of Astronomy for Development, Cruise assisted in the production of the first school astronomy textbook in the Pashto language, to support education in Afghanistan.

Research Cruise developed spacecraft instrumentation, initially for X-ray astronomy, contributing to X-ray space telescopes including Ariel V, Ariel VI, ROSAT, XMM-Newton and Spektr-RG. and built several prototypes of such instruments in his laboratory at Birmingham. Cruise was part of the team that set the first experimental upper limits on gravitational waves at THz frequencies.

He was a member of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) collaboration, and obtained grant funding for the UK's contribution to the Advanced LIGO instrument. His work led to UK involvement in the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission

Honours and recognition In 2016, Cruise was one of approximately 1000 authors listed on the paper announcing the first observation of gravitational waves. All members of that team were jointly awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and the Gruber Prize in Cosmology later that year.

Cruise was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2024 New Year Honours for services to space sciences.