ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has congratulated Pakistani-born American astrophysicist Professor Nergis Mavalvala for her role in the detection of gravitational waves, Radio Pakistan reported.

Mavalvala is a source of inspiration for Pakistani scientists and students who aspire to become scientists, he said.

The prime minister directed the Ministry of Science and Technology to devise a framework facilitating Pakistani scientists in their pursuits within one week.

Read: Nergis Mavalvala, Pakistan’s unexpected celebrity scientist

Born in Karachi, Professor Mavalvala, whose career spans 20 years, is currently Associate Department Head of Physics at MIT and a member of the team of scientists that announced last week the scientific milestone of detecting gravitational waves, ripples in space and time hypothesised by physicist Albert Einstein a century ago.

Mavalvala did her BA at Wellesley College in Physics and Astronomy in 1990 and a Ph.D in physics in 1997 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Before that, she was a postdoctoral associate and then a research scientist at California Institute of Technology (Caltech), working on the Laser Interferometric Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO).

She has been involved with LIGO since her early years in graduate school at MIT and her primary research has been in instrument development for interferometric gravitational-wave detectors.

Know more: Nergis Mavalvala: The Karachiite who went on to detect Einstein's gravitational waves