Katherine Freese
The University of Texas at Austin
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Primary Section: 13, Physics Secondary Section: 12, Astronomy Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2020)
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Biosketch
Freese received her BA in Physics from Princeton Univ, MA in Physics from Columbia Univ, and PhD in Physics from Univ of Chicago. She was a postdoc at Harvard/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Presidential Fellow at UC Berkeley, postdoc at ITP Santa Barbara, Asst Prof at MIT, George E. Uhlenbeck Prof at Univ of MI, and now Jeff & Gail Kodosky Endowed Chair at UT, Austin. From 2014-2016 she was Director of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (NORDITA). Freese works in theoretical cosmology. 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 has been very active in outreach, including on TV, radio and public lectures. Her book, The Cosmic Cocktail: Three Parts Dark Matter, was published by Princeton University Press. In 2012 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate (Honoris Causa) at the University of Stockholm as well as a Simons Foundation Fellowship in Theoretical Physics. In 2017 she gave the Kavli Prize Lecture to kickoff the American Astronomical Society Meeting; in 2019 she won the Lilienfeld Prize from the American Physical Society.
Research Interests
Freese works in the field of theoretical cosmology and astroparticle physics, which seeks to explain the large scale properties of the Universe in terms of its smallest particle content. 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 was a pioneer in the physics of Weakly Interacting Dark Matter; her calculations helped to jumpstart underground and indirect detection searches. She proposed Dark Stars, early stars made of hydrogen and helium but powered by dark matter heating rather than by fusion. Her work also includes the search for a successful inflationary theory to kick off the Big Bang. Her natural inflation model is a theoretically well-motivated variant of inflation. Currently she is interested in using her idea of chain inflation to explain different epochs of vacuum domination in the Universe; GAIA data to learn about the nature of dark matter; examining a variety of data sets to examine WIMPs and axions as dark matter candidates; and looking for hints of Physics Beyond the Standard Model in LIGO data.
