Freedman, Wendy

Wendy is the Crawford H. Greenewalt Chair and Director of the Carnegie Observatories (she was the first woman appointed to the Carnegie’s permanent scientific staff). Her primary interests are observational cosmology, galactic evolution, and the evolution of stellar populations. She was Principle Investigator of the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project on the Extragalactic Distance Scale, which successfully refined the accuracy of the current expansion rate of the universe, known as the Hubble constant. She measured the Hubble constant within very tight boundaries, thus determining the rate of the universe's expansion and, run backwards, the age of the universe (~13.7 billion years). She is one of the leaders in the construction of a major next generation telescope, the Giant Magellan (consisting of seven mirrors, each 27 feet in diameter).