Wendy Laurel Freedman is a Canadian-American astronomer, best known for her measurement of the Hubble Constant, and as John and Marion Sullivan University Professor in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago.

She received a PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. Joining the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California, as a post-doctoral fellow, she became a faculty member of the scientific staff three years later as the first woman to join Carnegie’s permanent staff. In 2003 she was named to the Crawford H. Greenewalt Chair and Director of Carnegie Observatories. Freedman’s early work was principally on the Cepheid distance scale.

Freedman is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. She has received the Magellanic Premium Award of the American Philosophical Society. In 1994, Freedman received 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”. She has also been awarded a Centennial Lectureship of the American Physical Society (1999) and a Cosmos Club Award (2000). She is a recipient of the 2009 Gruber Prize for Cosmology.