May 30, 2024
Professor Wendy Freedman is the recipient of the Prix G. Lemaître 2024. She was giving a talk for the general public on the May 16th and a talk for specialists on the May 17th at the University of Louvain, Belgium, home to Georges Lemaitre. The content was "Modern Measurements of the Hubble-Lemaître Law".
Lemaitre was a Belgian priest who, in 1927 solved Einstein's equations and used existing data to conclude that we live in an expanding universe. This gave rise to what we now know as the Hubble-Lemaitre law.
Prof. Freedman is a Canadian-American cosmologist at the University of Chicago who works in the area of refining measurement of the Hubble Constant. She is renowned for her work on Cepheid variable stars through a Hubble Space Telescope Key Project. Her work and accomplishments are closely connected to the big-bang theory of Georges Lemaître.
Wendy Freedman's research is in observational cosmology (measures of the expansion rate of the universe using the Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope and the ground-based Magellan telescope). Her current projects involve measurements of the Hubble constant -- the current expansion rate, as well as the past expansion rate -- providing constraints on the acceleration of the universe and dark energy.