Katherine Freese

Katherine Freese is the Jeff and Gail Kodosky Endowed Chair in Physics and a professor of physics at The University of Texas at Austin. She is known for her work on a wide range of topics in theoretical cosmology and astroparticle physics. She has been working to identify the dark matter and dark energy that permeate the universe as well as to build a successful model for the early universe immediately after the Big Bang. She is author of a book The Cosmic Cocktail: Three Parts Dark Matter, published in June 2014 by Princeton University Press. She was awarded the 2019 Lilienfeld Prize  from the American Physical Society “for ground-breaking research at the interface of cosmology and particle physics, and her tireless efforts to communicate the excitement of physics to the general public.” In 2020, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Freese's work is in theoretical cosmology, at the interface of astrophysics and particle physics. This field has seen remarkable successes in the past decade, yet many questions remain, including: What is the universe made of? What is the dark matter? What is the dark energy? What makes the universe accelerate, both now and during an early period of inflation? Freese's research seeks to address these questions.