Dr. Katherine (Katie) Mack is not just a cosmologist - she is the cosmologist who made the phrase
"the end of everything" feel like an invitation to look up and pay attention.
As the inaugural holder of the Hawking Chair in Cosmology and Science Communication
at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario,
she holds one of the most distinctive positions in modern science:
half rigorous researcher, half gifted explainer, entirely herself.
Her research sits at the sharp end of what physics can say about existence:
dark matter, the mysterious substance that outweighs all the stars put together but refuses to be seen;
vacuum decay, the scenario where the universe might simply stop being stable with zero warning;
primordial black holes and the Epoch of Reionization,
when the first light flooded a dark cosmos.
She studies, in short, the architecture of everything, including how it eventually stops.
Her 2020 book, The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking),
laid out five ways the cosmos could cease - Big Crunch, Heat Death, Big Rip, Vacuum Decay, Bounce -
with such wit and clarity that it landed on the New York Times Notable Books list
and year-end recommendations from The Washington Post, The Economist, New Scientist, and The Guardian.
Physics had rarely been so readable. The apocalypse had rarely been so charming.
Online, she is @AstroKatie, a science communicator who built an audience of
over 400,000 Twitter/X followers not through algorithms or brand strategy,
but through being genuinely funny, genuinely brilliant, and completely unwilling
to pretend that physics is boring. She has written for Scientific American, Slate,
Time, Cosmos, Sky & Telescope, and The Guardian.
She co-hosted Crash Course Pods: The Universe with author John Green in 2024.
She publishes The Last Star newsletter.
She also, as of 2020, flies planes. Instrument-rated in both the US and Canada,
with tailwheel and complex endorsements, she discovered aviation by noticing a flight school sign
during COVID lockdowns and decided to do something about it.
She is currently working toward aerobatic competition qualifications.
She is on the board of the Canadian Aviation Museum.
She is a member of The Ninety-Nines, the international women pilots organization.
The woman who studies the end of the universe is also, quietly, working on how to turn one upside down.
Her grandfather worked on the Apollo 11 mission at Caltech.
Her mother watched Star Trek and Star Wars with her. She became a vegetarian at age 7.
She went to Caltech for her undergraduate degree and Princeton for her PhD.
Hozier wrote a song partly about her Twitter explanations of physics.
She was a jury member at Sundance in 2019.
These facts do not add up to a single genre. That is the point.
