David Blair is a gravitational wave physicist who has spent more than 4 decades developing methods for the detection of gravitational waves. In 1984 he invented the sapphire clock. During the 1990s he set up the Gingin gravitational wave research centre. The Gingin centre researched techniques which were implemented in the LIGO gravitational wave detectors that eventually detected gravitational waves in 2015. He is a founding member of the OzGrav Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery.
In 2003 Blair founded the Gravity Discovery Centre - a major Centre for the promotion of science in Western Australia. In 2010 Blair and collaboration partners developed the Science Education Enrichment Project that evolved into the Einstein-First Project which aims to introduce Einsteinian Physics at an early age. In 2019 a 7-nation international collaboration was funded with the aim of re-designing the entire school curriculum starting at primary school, to reflect the modern understanding of space, time, matter and radiation.
Blair is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and the American Physical Society. He shared the Breakthrough Prize with all members of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration in 2016 and in 2020 he was a recipient of the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science.