Born: 17 July 1957, Canada
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Dr. Wendy Freedman was in her 40s when she was the lead author on the 2001 paper “Final Results from the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project to Measure the Hubble Constant.” What that very academic title fails to convey is that Freedman and her team had calculated more precisely than ever before the rate at which the universe is expanding, or the Hubble constant. The constant enables scientists to more accurately calculate the age of the universe, its early structure, and the amount of dark matter it contains, helping them find answers to countless other questions in astronomy, physics, and cosmology.
Previously, Dr. Freedman became the first woman appointed to the Carnegie Observatories’ permanent scientific staff, in 1987. She was named chair and director of the Observatories in 2003, and chair of the board of directors of the Giant Magellan Telescope project since its inception that year. Now a professor at the University of Chicago, she continues to work on refining our understanding of the Hubble constant, as well as dark energy, stellar populations of galaxies, the evolution of galaxies, and the initial mass function.