John Friedman has worked on a variety of problems in gravitational physics, involving neutron stars, black holes and gravitational collapse, the topology of spacetime, and topological questions in quantum gravity.

John Friedman received his B.A from Harvard College in 1967 and his Ph.D from the University of Chicago in 1973, supervised by Nobel laureate S. Chandrasekhar. From 1974 to 1976 he was a Fermi Fellow at the University of Chicago. Since 1976 he has been at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where Friedman served for three years as Chair of the Department of Physics and where he currently holds the rank of University Distinguished Professor.

Friedman is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a former chair of its gravitational physics section. He has served on the editorial boards of several prestigious journals, including Classical and Quantum Gravity, Physical Review Letters and Physical Review D. Professor Friedman is currently a U.S. representative to the International Society of General Relativity and Gravitation.