| 1 | Name: | Dr. Wendy Freedman | |
| Institution: | University of Chicago | ||
| Year Elected: | 2007 | ||
| Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1957 | ||
Wendy Freedman is the John and Marion Sullivan Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. A native of Toronto, Canada, she received her doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of Toronto in 1984. In the same year she received a Carnegie Fellowship at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California, and joined the faculty in 1987. From 2003-2014 she served as the Crawford H. Greenewalt Director of the Carnegie Observatories, and from 2003-2015, she served as the founding chair of the Board of Directors for the Giant Magellan Telescope, a 25-m optical telescope scheduled for completion in Chile in the 2030s. Professor Freedman is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. She is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society and The Royal Society, and a Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society. Professor Freedman’s awards include the Marc Aaronson Lectureship and Prize, the McGovern Award for her work on cosmology, and the American Philosophical Society's Magellanic Prize. She is one of three co-recipients of the 2009 Gruber Cosmology Prize and has also been awarded the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics by the American Institute of Physics and American Astronomical Society. Her primary research interests are in observational cosmology. Professor Freedman was a principal investigator for a team of thirty astronomers who carried out the Hubble Key Project to measure the current expansion rate of the Universe. Presently her research interests are directed at increasing the accuracy of measurements of the expansion rate and testing whether there is new fundamental early-universe physics. She is Principal Investigator of a new first-cycle program with the James Webb Space Telescope to measure the Hubble constant to percent-level precision. | |||