Shanghai's Fudan University announced on Thursday that the 2017 Fudan-Zhongzhi Science Award will be presented to three scientists for their extraordinary contributions to research on gravitational waves.

The three individuals are Rainer Weiss, a professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as Kip Stephen Thorne and Barry Clark Barish, both of whom are professors from the California Institute of Technology.

Weiss invented the laser interferometer gravitational-wave detector that became the foundation for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), which detected gravitational waves for the first time in human history in September 2015, according to the executive council of the award.

Thorne created research programs that modeled gravitational waves emitted by astrophysical processes and developed data analysis methods, while Barish was the former director of the LIGO project who created the international LIGO Scientific Collaboration. Barish also fostered greater collaboration between research parties that eventually enabled the detection of gravitational waves.

The award ceremony will be held on Dec 17 in Shanghai. The laureates will share a monetary award of 3 million yuan ($455,000).

The Fudan-Zhongzhi Science Award was jointly founded by Fudan University and Zhongzhi Enterprise Group in 2015 to recognize scientists who have made distinguished achievements in the fields of biomedicine, physics and mathematics.