He was a professor emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, co-founded the LIGO project, and was a co-inventor of the Pound–Drever–Hall technique for laser stabilisation, as well as the Hughes–Drever experiment.

[2][3][4][5][6][7] Drever died on 7 March 2017, aged 85,[8] seven months before his colleagues Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on the observation of gravitational waves.

[9] The trio of Drever, Thorne and Weiss shared several major physics prizes in 2016, so it is widely believed that Drever would have won the Nobel Prize in the place of Barry Barish had he not died before the Nobel Committee made their decision.

[17] Drever's contributions to the design and implementation of the LIGO interferometers were critically important to their ability to function in the extreme sensitivity realm required for detection of gravitational waves (10−23 strain).

Drever's final work involved the development of magnetically levitated optical tables for seismic isolation of experimental apparatus.