Physical and mathematical scientists

Karen I. Goldberg

Karen I. Goldberg is an inorganic chemist, the Vagelos Professor of Energy Research at the University of Pennsylvania since 2017, known for C–H activation and catalysis.

Karen I. Winey

Karen I. Winey is an American materials scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, the Harold Pender Professor, known for carbon-nanotube polymer composites and proton-conducting polymers.

Karen Jean Meech is an American planetary astronomer and astrobiologist at the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy, best known for leading the study of ʻOumuamua, the first known interstellar object.

Karen K. Gleason

Karen K. Gleason is an American chemical engineer and MIT professor, emerita, known for developing initiated chemical vapor deposition, a dry method for growing polymer films on surfaces.

Karen L. Wooley

Karen L. Wooley is an American polymer chemist, a University Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University since 2009, known for degradable polymers built from natural products.

Karen Scrivener

Karen Scrivener is a materials scientist, professor at EPFL, and director of the LC3 project, which developed limestone calcined clay cement cutting CO2 emissions by up to 40 percent.

Karen Uhlenbeck

Karen Uhlenbeck, born 1942 in Cleveland, Ohio, is an American mathematician known for work on minimal surfaces and Yang–Mills theory, and the first woman to win the Abel Prize, in 2019.

Karena W. Chapman

Karena W. Chapman is an Australian-born materials chemist, a professor at Stony Brook University since 2018, known for developing X-ray pair distribution function methods for energy materials.

Kari Karhunen

Kari Karhunen (1915–1992) was a Finnish mathematician who took his doctorate at Helsinki in 1947; his 1946 dissertation gave the Karhunen–Loève expansion, the continuous-time counterpart of principal component analysis.

Kariamanickam Srinivasa Krishnan

Kariamanickam Srinivasa Krishnan, known as K. S. Krishnan, was an Indian experimental physicist who co-discovered the Raman effect with C. V. Raman in 1928 and founded the National Physical Laboratory of India.

Karin Öberg

Karin Öberg is a Swedish astrochemist, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor at Harvard University, known for observations of molecules in protoplanetary disks and laboratory experiments on interstellar ices.

Karina Morgenstern

Karina Morgenstern is a German physical chemist, professor of Physical Chemistry at Ruhr University Bochum since 2012, known for imaging and manipulating individual molecules on metal surfaces.

Karl A. Scheidt

Karl A. Scheidt is an American organic chemist, professor at Northwestern University since 2002, known for N-heterocyclic carbene organocatalysis, cooperative carbene and Lewis acid catalysis, and cofounding therapeutics startups.

Karl Alfred von Zittel

Karl Alfred von Zittel (1839–1904) was a German paleontologist, professor at Munich from 1866 and director of its paleontological museum, best known for the Handbuch der Palaeontologie (1876–93).

Karl Anker Jørgensen

Karl Anker Jørgensen (born 1955 in Aarhus, Denmark) is a Danish organic chemist and professor at Aarhus University, known for asymmetric organocatalysis and for the Jørgensen–Hayashi catalyst.

Karl August Folkers

Karl August Folkers was an American organic chemist who isolated vitamin B12, the treatment for pernicious anemia, at Merck and later devoted his career to coenzyme Q10.

Karl Börjesson

Karl Börjesson, born 1982, is a professor of chemistry at the University of Gothenburg working at the border of chemistry and physics on strong exciton–photon coupling, triplet–triplet annihilation upconversion, and covalent organic framework films.

Sep 19, 2026

Karl Compton

Karl Compton (1887–1954) was an American physicist known for electron physics and photoelectric-effect research, a Princeton professor, and MIT's ninth president from 1930 to 1948.

Karl E. Taylor

Karl E. Taylor is an American climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who has coordinated the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project since 1989 and created the Taylor diagram.

Karl Engler

Karl Engler, born Carl Oswald Viktor Engler (1842–1925), was a German chemist who founded petroleum science, invented the Engler viscometer, and achieved the first complete synthesis of indigo.

Karl F. Freed

Karl F. Freed, also known as Karl Frederick Freed, was an American theoretical chemist and polymer physicist at the University of Chicago, known for the lattice cluster theory of polymer blends.

Karl Freudenberg

Karl Johann Freudenberg (1886–1983) was a German organic chemist, trained in Emil Fischer's laboratory, who established cellulose as a linear glucose polymer and spent over forty years on lignin's constitution.

Karl Friedrich Küstner

Karl Friedrich Küstner (1856–1936) was a German astronomer, director of the Bonn Observatory from 1891 to 1925, and the first to demonstrate the Earth's polar motion experimentally.

Karl Glazebrook

Karl Glazebrook, born 1965, is a British-born observational astronomer at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, known for establishing massive galaxies existed three billion years after the Big Bang.

Sep 17, 2026

Karl Gordon Henize

Karl Gordon Henize (1926–1993) was an American astronomer who compiled catalogs of southern-hemisphere emission-line stars and nebulae and flew on the 1985 Spacelab 2 shuttle mission.

Karl Herzfeld

Karl Herzfeld was an Austrian-born American theoretical physicist who founded the relaxation theory of ultrasonic sound absorption, taught at the Catholic University of America, and joined the National Academy of Sciences in 1960.

Karl Heun

Karl Heun (1859–1929) was a German mathematician who introduced Heun's equation, a second-order differential equation generalizing the hypergeometric equation, and Heun's 1900 method, an early step in the Runge–Kutta lineage.

Karl K. Berggren

Karl K. Berggren is an MIT electrical engineer working on superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors and nanofabrication; in 2025 he became faculty head of electrical engineering at MIT.

Karl K. Turekian

Karl K. Turekian (1927–2013) was an American geochemist who spent his career at Yale University, best known for osmium-isotope measurements supporting the meteorite impact that ended the dinosaurs.