Photo of Wendy L. Freedman

Wendy L. Freedman

  • National Medal of Science
  • Physical Sciences

For charting the distance to new galaxies. Wendy Freedman’s ground-breaking research on the Hubble constant, the rate at which the universe is expanding, tackles one of the greatest puzzles in astrophysics. It has informed her work on other major advances in outer space discovery, including through the Hubble Space and Giant Magellan telescopes, deepening our understanding of the universe.

Professor Wendy Freedman is one of ten named University Professors appointed by the president at the University of Chicago. For eleven years (2003-2014) she served as the Crawford H. Greenewalt Director of the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California. A native of Toronto, Canada, she received her doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of Toronto in 1984. She received a Carnegie Fellowship at the Observatories in 1984, joined the permanent staff in 1987, and was appointed Director in 2003. 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 Royal Society (FRS), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society and; 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 principle 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 program with the James Webb Space Telescope to measure the Hubble constant to percent-level precision.

Arati Prabhakar, Ph.D., Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), awards Wendy L. Freedman the National Medal of Science during an awards ceremony at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, DC, January 3, 2025. Photo by Ryan K. Morris