Karen Trentelman

Karen Trentelman specialized in chemistry and took courses in archaeology and art history at the University of Utah. She attended graduate school at Cornell University, where she earned her Ph.D. in chemical physics in 1989. Karen continued her postgraduate studies with two postdoctoral fellowships, the first at Northwestern University. She also volunteered at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1995, after a year in the conservation program at Buffalo State University, she was hired as a conservation scientist by the Detroit Institute of Arts. She was one of the first museum scientists to use Raman spectroscopy to analyze artworks and the first conservation scientist to receive a National Science Foundation fellowship. In 2004, Karen joined the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) to lead the Institute Museum Research Laboratory. Her current work includes conducting a study on an early 17th-century manuscript about Peruvian history and establishing GCI’s scientific laboratory at the Getty Villa, which focuses on Getty’s antiquities collection.