Katherine Freese

American astrophysicist

Katherine Freese (born 8 February 1957) is a German-born, American theoretical astrophysicist. She was awarded in 2019 the Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society and was elected in 2020 a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Quotes

edit
  • "What is the Universe made of?" The question is one of the deepest unanswered mysteries in all of human existence. Solving the puzzle has been my life's work and is the hottest research topic in cosmology and particle physics today.
  • ... On my father’s side, I come from a family of artists and architects. My grandfather was a Bauhaus architect in Germany and my grandmother was a painter. When my father as a child was tinkering around in the basement with chemistry sets, his mother said to him, “You’ll never make a living in science. Why don’t you go into the family business, the arts?” Well, he defied that advice. He was actually a PhD student with Heisenberg in Göttingen, and then a post-doc with Enrico Fermi in Chicago. After that he went to Caltech where he switched to biology and became one of the founders of the field of molecular biology. He founded the department of molecular biology at the University of Wisconsin. My mother was from a town on the Swiss-German border called Konstanz, and she actually got her PhD in biology at age 22.
edit

  Encyclopedic article on Katherine Freese on Wikipedia