David Ernest McClelland FAA is an Australian physicist, with his research focused on the development of the manipulation and control of optical quantum states, and its implementation into gravitational wave observatories.
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.
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.
He was the lead investigator for the Australian hardware contribution to the Advanced LIGO (USA) that, in September 2015, made the first direct observation of gravitational waves.
In 2021 he was awarded the Thomas Ranken Lyle Medal of the Australian Academy of Science for his work on quantum enhancement of gravitational wave detectors using squeezed states of light.