Physicists and astronomers

Katepalli R. Sreenivasan

Katepalli R. Sreenivasan, known as K. R. Sreenivasan, is a fluid dynamicist who studies turbulence and has been a University Professor at New York University since 2009.

Katerina Chatziioannou

Katerina Chatziioannou is a theoretical astrophysicist and Professor of Physics at Caltech who studies neutron-star matter and tests of general relativity with LIGO gravitational-wave data.

Katharina J. Franke is a physicist and professor at Freie Universität Berlin who studies single magnetic atoms and molecules on superconducting surfaces with low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy.

Katharine Tibbetts

Katharine Moore Tibbetts is an American chemist and Associate Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University whose research combines ultrafast laser spectroscopy of molecules with pulsed laser synthesis of nanomaterials; she received a PECASE award in 2019.

Katherine de Kleer

Katherine de Kleer is a planetary scientist and professor at Caltech who studies volcanism on Jupiter's moon Io; she received the 2024 Harold C. Urey Prize.

Katherine Freese

Katherine Freese is an American theoretical cosmologist and astroparticle physicist at the University of Texas at Austin, known for natural inflation, dark matter detection, and the book The Cosmic Cocktail.

Katherine Mack

Katherine (Katie) Mack is a theoretical astrophysicist and cosmologist who studies dark matter, wrote The End of Everything, and holds the Hawking Chair at Perimeter Institute.

Kathryn Moler

Kathryn Moler is a Stanford professor of applied physics known for scanning SQUID microscopy of superconductors and topological materials; she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2021.

Katsumi Midorikawa

Katsumi Midorikawa (緑川克美) is a Japanese physicist at RIKEN whose 2002 high-output attosecond pulse laser became an international standard; he led the RIKEN Center for Advanced Photonics from 2018 to 2023.

Kaye D. Lathrop

Kaye Don Lathrop was an American nuclear physicist known for discrete-ordinates, or Sn, methods; he won the 1976 E. O. Lawrence Award for neutron transport computer codes.

Kazuhiko Nishijima

Kazuhiko Nishijima (西島和彦, 1926–2009) was a Japanese theoretical particle physicist who, with Tadao Nakano and independently of Murray Gell-Mann, discovered the Gell-Mann–Nishijima formula relating hadron charge to strangeness, paving the way to the quark model.

Kazunari Matsuda

Kazunari Matsuda is a Japanese physicist and professor at Kyoto University's Institute of Advanced Energy, known for optical studies of carbon nanotubes and two-dimensional semiconductors.

Kazunari Shibata

Kazunari Shibata (柴田一成) is a Japanese solar astrophysicist at Kyoto University known for his unified model of solar flares and the discovery of superflares.

Kazushi Kanoda

Kazushi Kanoda (鹿野田一司) is a Japanese condensed matter physicist, a University of Tokyo professor since 1999, known for NMR studies of organic molecular conductors.

Keisuke Goda

Keisuke Goda (合田圭介) is a Japanese photonics and biomedical optics researcher, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Tokyo since 2012, known for ultrafast optical imaging and intelligent image-activated cell sorting.

Sep 20, 2026

Keith A. Nelson

Keith A. Nelson is an American physical chemist at MIT known for ultrafast optics and terahertz spectroscopy, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2026.

Keith A. Olive

Keith A. Olive is an American theoretical physicist at the University of Minnesota who works on big bang nucleosynthesis, particle dark matter, and inflation, winning the 2018 Hans A. Bethe Prize.

Keith Brueckner

Keith Brueckner (1924–2014) was an American theoretical physicist whose 1955 linked-cluster work founded Brueckner theory of nuclear matter; he was the founding chair of physics at UC San Diego.

Keith Schwab

Keith Schwab is an experimental physicist and Caltech professor of applied physics working on quantum nanomechanics and superfluid helium-4 devices, including resonator cooling toward the quantum ground state.

Kelli Humbird

Kelli Humbird is an American design physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory whose machine-learning methods guide fusion experiments at the National Ignition Facility; she received a 2025 PECASE award.

Kelsey Johnson

Kelsey Johnson is an astrophysicist and professor of astronomy at the University of Virginia, known for research on star formation and founding Dark Skies, Bright Kids.

Ken Freeman

Ken Freeman, born Kenneth Charles Freeman in 1940, is an Australian astronomer at Mount Stromlo Observatory who was among the first to show spiral galaxies contain dark matter.

Ken Pounds

Ken Pounds (Kenneth A. Pounds) is a British physicist who founded the University of Leicester's Space Research Group in 1960 and became known for work on X-ray reflection from accretion disks.

Ken-ichi Uchida

Ken-ichi Uchida (内田健一) is a Japanese condensed-matter physicist who pioneered spin caloritronics, known for the 2008 spin Seebeck effect and 2018 anisotropic magneto-Peltier effect.

Sep 20, 2026

Ken'ichi Nomoto

Ken'ichi Nomoto (野本憲一) is a Japanese theoretical astrophysicist known for supernova theory and stellar nucleosynthesis, a Senior Scientist at Kavli IPMU and Professor Emeritus of the University of Tokyo.

Kenichi Iga (伊賀健一)

Kenichi Iga (伊賀健一) is a Japanese electrical engineer, former president of Tokyo Institute of Technology, and inventor of the vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL), proposed in 1977.

Kenji Bekki

Kenji Bekki is a computational astrophysicist and professor at ICRAR, The University of Western Australia, known for supercomputer simulations of galaxy and star cluster formation.

Kenji Watanabe

Kenji Watanabe (渡邊賢司) is a Japanese physicist at NIMS in Tsukuba known for growing the high-purity hexagonal boron nitride crystals used worldwide as substrates for two-dimensional materials.

Kenneth B. Crozier

Kenneth B. Crozier, also known as Kenneth Crozier, is a physicist and professor of physics and electronic engineering at the University of Melbourne who researches nanophotonics, plasmonics, and optical trapping.