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Kathryn Zurek

American physicist

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 12, 2026
Entity authorityQ29589013 ↗
Source-derived summary

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 with cosmology and particle astrophysics. 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 studied for a bachelor's degree in physics at Bethel University, where she graduated summa cum laude in 2001 and was awarded the 2001 Seaborg Nobel Travel Award to participate in Nobel Foundation events and present to Nobel laureates. She then received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Washington in 2006. She was 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.

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The public source identifies “Kathryn Zurek” as american physicist. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Kathryn, Zurek and American.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2001, 2006, 2009, 2014—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Kathryn, Zurek and American providing the first useful test.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q29589013. VIAF identifies the subject as 1926159234296003371203. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2001, 2006, 2009 and 2014.

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This entry incorporates text from “Kathryn Zurek” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.