Prof. Deirdre Shoemaker is a physics professor and the director of the Center for Gravitational Physics at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests center on black holes and gravitational waves, understanding these and other aspects of strong gravity and how it reveals itself in the universe. To that end, Prof. Shoemaker works with gravitational wave detector teams to work toward understanding gravitational physics. Prof. Shoemaker is a member of LIGO Scientific Collaboration, the Cosmic Explorer Consortium, and the LISA Consortium where she co-chairs the Waveform Working Group. She has won the NSF Career award and is a fellow of the American Physical Society.

She received her B.S. in Physics, Astronomy, and Astrophysics from the Pennsylvania State University and her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Texas at Austin. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Penn State and Cornell University before joining the faculty at Penn State in 2004. She moved to the School of Physics at Georgia Tech in 2008 and to the Department of Physics at the University of Texas at Austin in 2020.