Professor Wendy Freedman is one of ten named University Professors appointed by the president of the University of Chicago. She is a trailblazer in astronomy and observational cosmology, and her current research focuses on increasing the accuracy of measurements of the universe’s expansion rate and testing for potential new fundamental early-universe physics. She previously served for eleven years as the Crawford H. Greenewalt Director of the Carnegie Observatories and was the founding chair of the Board of Directors for the Giant Magellan Telescope, a 25-meter optical telescope scheduled for completion in Chile in the 2030s.

Professor Freedman received her doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of Toronto and began a Carnegie Fellowship at their Observatories in 1984. She is one of three co-recipients of the 2009 Gruber Cosmology Prize and has received the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics, awarded by the American Institute of Physics and the American Astronomical Society.  In 2025, she was named one of TIME100’s most influential people in the world. She currently serves as the Principal Investigator of a James Webb Space Telescope program aimed at measuring the current expansion rate of the universe to percent-level precision. 

Learn More

Astrophysics.UChicago.edu