Kareem El-Badry (born 1994) is an American astronomer and astrophysicist. He is an assistant professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology.
El-Badry was born in Roseburg, Oregon. He attended Yale University as an undergraduate and received a PhD in astrophysics from UC Berkeley. He conducted postdoctoral research at Harvard University before moving to Caltech in 2023.
El-Badry's research is focused on black holes and binary stars. He discovered Gaia BH1, the nearest known black hole to the Earth. He also discovered the fastest-moving star known in the Milky Way, a white dwarf thought to have been ejected from a binary system when its companion exploded.
El-Badry was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2025.