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 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; 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 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 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.”

K. Freese has 270 publications with nearly 20,000 citations: 220 in refereed journals including Physical Review Letters, Astrophysical Journal Letters, Astrophysical Journal, Physical Review D, Physics Letters, Nature, Geophysical Research Letters, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, JHEP, JCAP, and Nuclear Physics B; and 50 conference proceedings.

She has presented 375 talks around the world: 120 talks at conferences (including the U.S., Italy, France, Germany, Sweden, England, Portugal, Denmark, Canada, and Japan), 100 colloquia at Physics and Astronomy Departments in the US, Europe, and Japan, 90 research seminars, and 65 public lectures.

The work of K. Freese has been covered in numerous press and magazine articles including New York Times, Scientific American, New Scientist (two cover page articles in 2023), The Economist, Sky and Telescope, Nature News, Science et Vie, Quanta Magazine, Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, and French National Geographic. She has been chosen as one of Business Insider’s Top 15 Women in Science as well as is a member of its list of Top 50 Scientists

Freese has appeared on numerous radio, TV, and podcast interviews. These include BBC TV’s “The Genius Behind,” BBC TV: ”Horizon: Dancing in the Dark – the end of Physics,” two episodes on How the Universe Works science television; NOVA Wonders: What’s the Universe Made Of? on PBS; many BBC radio interviews, National Public Radio, Quirks and Quarks on CBC radio, TV Ontario, Big Think, Coast to Coast AM, APS podcast on Physics Central, Groks Science, Virtually Speaking Science. Freese has also participated in televised panels from the World Science Festival in NY; the Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate Panel at the Museum of Natural History in New York; the Quantum to Cosmos Festival at Perimeter Institute in Canada; and a panel at the New York Academy of Sciences. Freese has twice been videotaped for the television program “Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman.”

Freese’s outreach efforts include 60 public lectures, including at TED-X Vienna, the Hayden Planetarium in NY (hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson), the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, the Edinburgh Science Festival, the Gothenburg Science Festival, the Hay Festival, the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, Adler Planetarium in Chicago, the World Science Festival in NY, the Houston Museum of Natural Science, and many others.

Freese has organized numerous conferences organized worldwide, including “2015: The Spacetime Odyssey Continues,” “COSMO-2016,” numerous Marcel Grossman Relativity meetings, as well as “Hawking Radiation” at Nordita for one week in August 2015 in Stockholm with Hawking in attendance

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1973-1974
Princeton University, B.A. in Physics 1977
Columbia University, M.A. in Physics 1981
University of Chicago, Ph.D. in Physics 1984, Advisor: Dr. David Schramm
1984-85: Postdoctoral fellow, Harvard Center for Astrophysics
1985-87: Postdoctoral fellow, Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of
California, Santa Barbara, CA
1987-88: Presidential Fellow, University of California, Berkeley

2022—present: Director, Weinberg Institute for Theoretical Physics at UT, Austin
2019 – present: Kodosky Professor of Physics, University of Texas, Austin, TX
2014-16: Director, Nordita (Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics)
2014 – present: Visiting Professor, Physics Dept, Stockholm University
2009-19: George E. Uhlenbeck Professor of Physics, University of Michigan
1991-2009: Professor of Physics, University of Michigan
1988-91: Assistant Professor of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

2024: Cozzarelli Prize from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
2021: University of Chicago Alumni Professional Achievement Award
2020–: member, National Academy of Sciences
2019: Julian Edgar Lilienfeld Prize, American Physical Society
2014-24: Excellence grant from the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsradet)
for the study of “CosmoParticle Physics” in the amount of roughly 15 million dollars
2017: Kavli Prize Lecture, American Astronomical Society
2012: Honorary Doctorate (Honoris Causa) at the University of Stockholm
2012: Simons Foundation Fellowship in Theoretical Physics

K. Freese has presented 375 talks around the world: 120 talks at conferences (including the U.S., Italy, France, Germany, Sweden, England, Portugal, Denmark, Canada, and Japan), 100 colloquia at Physics and Astronomy Departments in the US, Europe, and Japan, 90 research seminars, and 65 public lectures.

K. Freese has 270 publications with nearly 20,000 citations: 220 in refereed journals including Physical Review Letters, Astrophysical Journal Letters, Astrophysical Journal, Physical Review D, Physics Letters, Nature, Geophysical Research Letters, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, JHEP, JCAP, and Nuclear Physics B; and 50 conference proceedings

Freese has written a book The Cosmic Cocktail: Three Parts Dark Matter published by Princeton University Press in June 2014.

The work of K. Freese has been covered in numerous press and magazine articlesincluding New York Times, Scientific American, Sky and Telescope, Nature News, Science et Vie, Quanta Magazine, Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, and New, Scientist. She has been chosen as one of Business Insider’s Top 15 Women in Science as well as one of its list of Top 50 Scientists.

Freese has appeared on numerous radio, TV, and podcast interviews. These include StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson, BBC TV’s “The Genius Behind,” BBC TV: ”Horizon: Dancing in the Dark – the end of Physics,” two episodes on How the Universe Works science television; NOVA Wonders: What’s the Universe Made Of? on PBS; many BBC radio interviews, National Public Radio, Quirks and Quarks on CBC radio, TV Ontario, Big Think, Coast to Coast AM, APS podcast on Physics Central, Groks Science, Virtually Speaking Science. Freese has also participated in televised panels from the World Science Festival in NY; the Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate Panel at the Museum of Natural History in New York; the Quantum to Cosmos Festival at Perimeter Institute in Canada; and a panel at the New York Academy of Sciences. Freese has twice been videotaped for the television program “Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman.”

Freese has given 65 public lectures, including at TED-X Vienna, the Hayden Planetarium in NY (hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson), the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, the Edinburgh Science Festival, the Gothenburg Science Festival, the Hay Festival, the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, Adler Planetarium in Chicago, the World Science Festival in NY, the Houston Museum of Natural Science, and many others.

Numerous conferences organized worldwide, including “COSMO-2016” at Univ. of Michigan as well as “Hawking Radiation” at Nordita for one week in August 2015 in Stockholm with Hawking in attendance.