Kathryn Zurek

Kathryn M. Zurek is an American physicist and professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology. Her research interests primarily lie at the intersection of particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. She is known for her theories on dark matter's "hidden valleys", also known as hidden sectors.
Biography.
Zurek was born and raised in Minnesota. She earned her bachelor's degree in physics from Bethel University in 2001, graduating summa cum laude. She then received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Washington in 2006. Afterwards, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and served as the David Schramm Fellow in Fermilab's theoretical astrophysics group.
From 2009 to 2014, Zurek was an assistant and then associate professor at the University of Michigan. In 2014, she joined the Joint Particle Theory Group at the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics. She became a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech in 2019.