Peter Fritschel is a Senior Research Scientist in the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at MIT. He is currently Director of the LIGO-MIT group and Chief Detector Scientist of the LIGO Laboratory.

He received his BS in physics from Swarthmore College, and his PhD in physics from MIT, developing techniques for gravitational wave detection using interferometry. He is a recipient of the 2016 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and the 2018 Berkeley Prize in Astronomy. In 2022, the American Physical Society (APS) awarded the 2021 Richard A. Isaacson Award in Gravitational-Wave Science to Fritschel for “over three decades of key contributions to instrumentation for gravitational-wave detectors, and in particular for scientific leadership in the design and commissioning of Advanced LIGO, enabling the first detection of gravitational waves and the many detections that followed.”