Kathryn M. Zurek is a professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Her research interests primarily lie at the intersection of particle physics with cosmology and particle astrophysics. She is known for her theories on dark matter's "hidden valleys", also known as hidden sectors.

Zurek was born and raised in Minnesota. She studied for a bachelor's degree in physics at Bethel University, MN, where she graduated summa cum laude in 2001 and was awarded the 2001 Seaborg Nobel Travel Award to participate in Nobel Foundation events and present to Nobel laureates. She then received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Washington in 2006. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and served as the David Schramm Fellow in the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) theoretical astrophysics group.

From 2009 to 2014, Zurek was an Assistant and then Associate Professor at the University of Michigan. In 2014, she joined the Joint Particle Theory Group at the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics. She became a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech in 2019.

Zurek was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2016, and received a Simons Investigator award in 2020 from the Simons Foundation.