The Franklin Institute announced Nov. 11 that it is awarding the 2026 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honors in science, engineering and business leadership, to University of Chicago Prof. Wendy Freedman.
Freedman, the John and Marion Sullivan University Professor in Astronomy and Astrophysics, is a pioneering cosmologist who has made landmark measurements of the rate at which the universe is expanding, known as the Hubble constant.
The award cites Freedman’s “scientific investigations that established precision measurements of the expansion rate of the universe, and for leading efforts to make the next generation of these measurements even more precise.”
Freedman led a team that made a landmark measurement in 2001 of the Hubble constant—the rate at which the universe is expanding, which has major implications for our understanding of the laws and evolution of the universe. Since then, she has continued to make new measurements of the Hubble constant, including pioneering two additional methods to use different types of stars to check the accuracy of the measurements; as well as studying the stellar populations of galaxies, the evolution of galaxies and the initial mass function.
She led the initiative to build the Giant Magellan Telescope, one of the world’s largest optical telescopes—currently under construction in Chile—and served as director of the Carnegie Observatories before joining UChicago in 2014, where she is also a member of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics.
Among Freedman’s other awards are the National Medal of Honor, the Magellanic Premium, the Gruber Cosmology Prize and the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics. She was named to Nature’s 10 in 2024 and as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2025.
Freedman received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees as well as her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Science, the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Science, as well as a fellow of the American Physical Society and a legacy fellow of the American Astronomical Society.
Freedman joins a number of UChicago scientists and alumni who have been recognized by the Franklin Institute, dating back to Prof. Albert A. Michelson in 1923 through alum Edward C. Stone, who was honored in 2022.
The awards will be distributed at a gala in Philadelphia, at the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial at The Franklin Institute, in April 2026.
