Under an agreement with the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO), LSC members also have access to data from the Virgo detector in Pisa, Italy.

While the LSC and the Virgo Collaboration are separate organizations, they cooperate closely and are referred to collectively as "LVC".

[5] The Executive Director of the LIGO Laboratory is David Reitze from the University of Florida.

On 11 February 2016, the LIGO and Virgo collaborations[a] announced that they succeeded in making the first direct gravitational wave observation on 14 September 2015.

[6][7][8][9] In 2016, Barish received the Enrico Fermi Prize "for his fundamental contributions to the formation of the LIGO and LIGO-Virgo scientific collaborations and for his role in addressing challenging technological and scientific aspects whose solution led to the first detection of gravitational waves".