Laura Nuttall

"I was never somebody who knew that I wanted to do physics or study the stars. My life's always gone off my gut feeling, like this sounds like a good idea, let's go for it! In an optics course in University, my teacher went completely off-topic and talked about the GEO600 experiment trying to measure ripples in spacetime and I thought "Wow, that sounds bonkers, I wanna know more about it!" It was followed by learning about LIGO through Google, which looked wonderfully crazy, and I decided to get involved by doing my Master's project and my PhD in this field, and since then I've been very lucky to stick around."

Laura Nuttall is a senior lecturer in gravitational-wave physics at the University of Portsmouth. In LIGO, she has made contributions towards detector characterization and the electromagnetic follow-up observations of gravitational-wave sources. She's an outdoors enthusiast and spent part of her LIGO Special Breakthrough Prize money to go on an adventure around the Galapagos islands, Machu Picchu, Sao Paolo and Cuba. An admirer of black-and-white movies, she would love the opportunity roll back time and have a dinner with Audrey Hepburn.