Rate My Professor Wendy Freedman

Wendy L. Freedman is the John and Marion Sullivan University Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, a position she has held since joining the faculty in 2014. She received her BSc in 1979, MSc in 1980, and PhD in Astronomy in 1984, all from the University of Toronto. Prior to the University of Chicago, Freedman was a postdoctoral fellow at the Carnegie Observatories from 1984 to 1987, joined the permanent scientific staff in 1987, and served as the Crawford H. Greenewalt Director from 2003 to 2014. Her research in observational cosmology focuses on precise measurements of the Hubble constant, the current expansion rate of the universe, using the Hubble Space Telescope, James Webb Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope, and Magellan telescopes. She led the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project, resulting in the 2001 paper 'Final Results from the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project to Measure the Hubble Constant' published in The Astrophysical Journal, which established the universe's age at approximately 13.7 billion years. Current efforts include the Carnegie-Chicago Hubble Program, probing tensions between local Hubble constant measurements and cosmic microwave background inferences, as well as studies of dark energy, galaxy evolution, stellar populations, and the initial mass function.