Karen Uhlenbeck

Karen Uhlenbeck
Karen Uhlenbeck née Keskulla
Born	24 August 1942 (1942-08-24) (age 74) Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.
Residence	U.S.
Nationality	American
Fields	Mathematician
Institutions	University of Texas at Austin University of Chicago University of Illinois at Chicago Northwestern University University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Alma mater	Brandeis University University of Michigan
Doctoral advisor	Richard Sheldon Palais
Known for	Calculus of variations
Influences	Shing-Tung Yau
Notable awards	MacArthur Prize Fellowship Noether Lecturer (1988) National Medal of Science (2000) Leroy P. Steele Prize (2007)

Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck (born August 24, 1942) is a professor and Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chairholder in the Department of Mathematics at The University of Texas in Austin.

Uhlenbeck received her B.A. (1964) from the University of Michigan. She began her graduate studies at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, and married biophysicist Olke C. Uhlenbeck (the son of physicist George Uhlenbeck) in 1965. When her husband went to Harvard, she moved with him and restarted her studies at Brandeis University, where she earned a M.A. (1966) and Ph.D. (1968) from Brandeis University under the supervision of Richard Palais. Her doctoral dissertation was titled The Calculus of Variations and Global Analysis.

After temporary jobs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of California, Berkeley, and having difficulty finding a permanent position with her husband because of the anti-nepotism rules then in place, she took a faculty position at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1971. However, she disliked Urbana and ended up divorcing her husband and moving to the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1976. She moved again to the University of Chicago in 1983, and to the University of Texas as the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chairholder in 1988.