Katherine Freese is the Director of the Weinberg Institute for Theoretical Physics as well as the Jeff & Gail Endowed Chair of Physics at the University of Texas, Austin. She is also Guest Professor of Physics at Stockholm University, where she received a $13M grant over ten years (2014-2024) for research in Cosmoparticle Physics. She served as Director of NORDITA, the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, from 2014-2106.  She works 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 the author of a book The Cosmic Cocktail: Three Parts Dark Matter, published in June 2014 by Princeton University Press.

Freese received her B.A. in Physics from Princeton University in 1977 (where as far as she knows she was the second female physics major); her M.A. in Physics in 1981 from Columbia University; and her Ph.D. in Physics in 1984 from the University of Chicago, where she was the recipient of the William Rainey Harper Award Fellowship. She held postdoctoral positions at the Harvard/ Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, and a Presidential Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. She was an Assistant Professor at MIT from 1987-1991, where she was the recipient of a SLOAN Foundation Fellowship. Then she moved to the University of Michigan (as the first woman to be hired onto the faculty ) from 1991-2019 where she was awarded the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award from 1990-1995 and was named George E. Uhlenbeck Professor of Physics. She moved to Texas in 2019.

Freese is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences as well as a Fellow of the American Physical Society. She is the recipient of many awards including: the University of Chicago Alumni Professional Achievement Award in 2021; an Honorary Doctorate (honoris cause) from the University of Stockholm in 2021; a Simons Foundation Fellowship in Theoretical Physics in 2012; a Visiting Miller Professorship at the University of California, Berkeley in 2007; and she was invited to give the Kavli Prize Lecture at the American Astronomical Society meeting in 2017. She was awarded the Lilienfeld Prize from the American Physical Society in 2019 “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.”