Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck (born August 24, 1942 in Cleveland, Ohio) is a professor and Sid W. Richardson Regents Chairholder in the Department of Mathematics at The University of Texas in Austin. In 1988 she was selected to be a Noether Lecturer. In 2000, she became a recipient of the National Medal of Science. In 2007 she won the American Mathematical Society Steele Prize and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Harvard University. She has also been a MacArthur Fellow.
Uhlenbeck received her B.A. (1964) from the University of Michigan, and 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. She participates or has participated in research in the fields of geometric partial differential equations, the calculus of variations, gauge theory, integrable systems, Virasoro actions, nonlinear waves, and nonlinear Schrödinger equations.