Corey Gray is Scottish & Blackfoot and a member of the Siksika Nation of Alberta, Canada. He grew up in southern California and received Bachelor of Science degrees in Physics and Applied Mathematics from Humboldt State University (HSU).
After undergrad, he was hired by Caltech to work for the astronomy project, LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory) in Washington State. At LIGO, Corey worked on teams to both build and operate gravitational wave detectors.
The LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) made historic news in 2016 by announcing the FIRST direct detection of gravitational waves, which helped prove a prediction made 100 years earlier by Albert Einstein! This also won founders of LIGO the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2017.
Corey is proud to be Indigenous. He recruited Sharon Yellowfly (his mom) to translate scientific documents for LIGO into the Blackfoot language. He has been invited to give talks around the US & Canada.
In his free time, Corey likes to backpack, travel, salsa dance, cross-country ski, go to pow wows, share science with the public, and kayak (with a wooden kayak he recently built).