Rochus Eugen (Robbie) Vogt (born December 21, 1929) is a German-American physicist, famous as the director and principal investigator of the LIGO project from 1987 to 1994.
[2] His doctoral dissertation Primary cosmic-ray and solar protons[3] was supervised by Peter Meyer.
[6] Vogt received the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for his work as a principal investigator on the Voyager mission, and was chief scientist at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1977–78.
He led the construction of Caltech’s Owens Valley Radio Observatory’s mm-wave interferometer, had a lead role in bringing about the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and served as vice chair of the board of directors of the California Association for Research in Astronomy.
From 1987 to 1994 he served as the director and principal investigator of the Caltech-MIT Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory project, becoming a co-recipient of the 2016 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.