Katherine Freese, University of Texas at Austin, is visiting us

Katherine Freese is a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin since 2019. She’s also a visiting professor at Stockholm University.

She’s an expert on dark matter and dark energy. From early on in her career she has contributed to the way we detect and think of dark matter. She helped rule out massive compact halo objects in favour of weakly interacting massive particles as an explanation for dark matter. She has also proposed the existence of dark stars, giant stars powered by dark matter annihilation. Her Cardassian expansion model offers a modification of the Friedmann equation that replaces the need for vacuum energy.

In 2019 she was awarded the Lilienfeld prize for her ground-breaking research on cosmology and particle physics as well as her efforts towards science communication.

She is visiting the IFT for the Colloquium: Dark Matter in the Universe. (Tuesday, May 21)