Career

David McClelland received his PhD degree from the University of Otago, New Zealand, in 1987. He was awarded a Beverly Research Fellowship before being appointed in 1988 to the Australian National University, as a Lecturer.

In 1990, at the ANU, he and his colleagues (H. Bachor, P. Manson, P. Fisk and D. Hope) demonstrated -0.8 dB of optical squeezing at a few hundred mega Hertz using barium atoms. Over the years he establish the Centre for Gravitational Physics at the ANU, and build a rich and vibrant research group working on a squeezed light source in the audio-frequency band for future gravitational wave detectors.

In 1998 he became the chair of the Australian Consortium for Interferometric Gravitational Astronomy (ACIGA). This is a consortium of 6 Australian institutions collaborating and working on research and development for current and future gravitational wave detectors around the world. Its members contributed to the LIGO instrument and data analyses for the first direct detection of gravitational waves of a merger of a binary black hole merger.

In late 2003 with his graduate students they demonstrated squeezing down to a few hundred Hertz using nonlinear crystals.^[2] This technique and implementation is still used to produce the best optical squeezers in the world.

In 2020 he established the Centre for Gravitational Astrophysics that is a joint facility of ANU Research School of Physics and Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics.