1. Wendy Laurel Freedman was born on July 17,1957 and is a Canadian-American astronomer, best known for her measurement of the Hubble constant, and as director of the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California, and Las Campanas, Chile.
12 Facts About Wendy Freedman
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Wendy Freedman remained at Toronto for her graduate work, receiving a Ph.
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Wendy Freedman was co-leader of an international team of 30 astronomers to carry out the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project, a program aiming to establish the distance scale of the Universe and measure the current expansion rate, a quantity known as the Hubble constant.
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The project's researchers, led by Wendy Freedman, published their final result in 2001.
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Wendy Freedman continues to refine her measurements of the Hubble constant using not just Cepheid variables but the method of the tip of the red-giant branch.
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Wendy Freedman initiated the Giant Magellan Telescope Project and served as chair of the board of directors from its inception in 2003 until 2015.
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Wendy Freedman has been elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society.
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Wendy Freedman was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2023.
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Wendy Freedman has received several awards for her contributions to observational cosmology, including a Centennial Lectureship of the American Physical Society, the John P McGovern Award in Science, the Magellanic Premium Award of the American Philosophical Society and the Marc Aaronson Lectureship and prize "in recognition of a decade of fundamental contributions to the areas of the extra galactic distance scale and the stellar populations of galaxies".
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In 2009 Wendy Freedman was one of three co-recipients of the Gruber Cosmology Prize.
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Wendy Freedman was elected a Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society in 2020.
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In 2025, Wendy Freedman was a recipient of the National Medal of Science.