On March 29-31, 2018, the UF Physics Department hosted GuenakhFest [link1], an event organized to recognize scientific achievements of Distinguished Professor Guenakh Mitselmakher. In particular, Guenakh's vision led the University of Florida to play significant roles in the two most important discoveries in fundamental physics in the last decade, the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, and the detection by the LIGO collaboration of gravitational waves emitted by merging black holes. The video presents the GuenakhFest opening colloquium delivered by Barry Barish, Linde Professor of Physics emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, and the recipient of the Nobel prize for the experiental observation of Gravitational Waves. The other 20 talks given by Guenakh’s colleagues from all around the world can be found at theGuenakhFest scientific program page [link 2].

[link 1] http://phys.ufl.edu/events/guenakhfest/
[link 2] http://phys.ufl.edu/events/guenakhfest/program.html

Barry Barish, Linde Professor of Physics emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, has made important contributions in particle physics, gravitational physics, and astrophysics. He worked in neutrino physics at Fermilab, directed a magnetic monopole search at Grand Sasso, and was the spokesperson for the GEM detector at the SSC. (Guenakh Mitslemaker was also part of the GEM collaboration.)

In 1994 he took charge of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project as principal investigator/director (1994–2005) and saw the project through construction, commissioning and the first science runs. As director he expanded the LIGO collaboration; the Florida LIGO group, led by Guenakh Mitselmakher, was the first new group to join the original Caltech-MIT collaboration. Barish initiated the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, now a partnership of 2000 scientists at more than 100 institutions that carries out the LIGO science program, and continues as a member of the collaboration today.

Barry Barish is an alumnus of the University of Florida, having in 2007 been awarded an honorary doctorate of Physics. In October 2017, Barish was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics along with Rainer Weiss of MIT and Kip Thorne of Caltech "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves."