David Tanner is a distinguished professor art the University of Florida. He is a condensed matter experimentalist, working on optical properties of novel materials. He is also an astrophysicist, who is nowadays deeply involved in axion search and gravitational waves. He has been a part of the team that constructed LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory project. In this talk, he will tell us about the experimental side of detecting the graviational waves. He will also discuss the data analysis for detection of the first event (150914).