STEM Spotlight: Katherine Freese

March is Women's History Month, and we thought we would celebrate by introducing you to some women who are making STEM history now.  Meet theoretical physicist Katherine Freese.

​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. She served as Director of NORDITA, the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, from 2014-2106.

Freese works on a wide range of topics in theoretical cosmology and astroparticle physics. She has contributed to early research on dark matter and dark energy.  She has been working to build a successful model of the early universe immediately after the Big Bang.

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 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.”

Freese's students consider her to be an engaging professor who makes her students feel like independent thinkers.