Helen Freedhoff

Helen Sarah Freedhoff (January 9, 1940 – June 10, 2017) was a Canadian theoretical physicist who studied the interaction of light with atoms.^[1] She was born in Toronto, Ontario.

She gained her doctorate at the University of Toronto in 1965 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Imperial College in London. Freedhoff was the first woman appointed as a physics professor at York University in Toronto, and is believed to have been the only woman professor of theoretical physics in Canada at the time.^[2] She married Stephen Freedhoff while an undergraduate, and had two children, Michal Freedhoff and Yoni Freedhoff.

Freedhoff died suddenly of cardiac arrest on 10 June 2017 at the family's cottage in Muskoka, Ontario, aged 77.^[2]