Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck is a professor and Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chairholder in the Department of Mathematics at The University of Texas in Austin. Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on August 24, 1942, to Arnold Edward Keskulla, an engineer, and Carolyn Windeler Keskulla, an artist. Uhlenbeck received her Ph.D. in mathematics from Brandeis in 1968 with a thesis on the calculus of variations. Her first teaching position was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968. The following year she moved to Berkeley, California, where she was a lecturer in mathematics at the University of California. There she studied general relativity and the geometry of space-time, and worked on elliptic regularity in systems of partial differential equations. On December 1, 2000, she received a National Medal of Science for "special recognition by reason of outstanding contributions to knowledge" in the area of mathematics. She has also served as Vice-President of the American Mathematical Society. In 1990 she became only the second woman to give a Plenary Lecture at an International Congress of Mathematics.