63rd Alpheus Smith Lecture featuring Professor Wendy Freedman
Professor Wendy Freedman
John and Marion Sullivan University Professor
of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the College
The University of Chicago
Alpheus Smith Lecture
Open to the Public
Title: TBA
Thursday, November 5th, 2026, 7:30 PM EST
Location: TBD
Abstract: TBA
Bio: 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, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society; and a Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society. She is a recipient of the National Medal of Science, and was named by Time magazine in 2025 as one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.
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 first-cycle program with the James Webb Space Telescope to measure the Hubble constant to percent-level precision.