Daan Frenkel

Education

By training, Frenkel is an experimental physical chemist who completed his PhD at the University of Amsterdam (1977).

Career and research

Frenkel worked as postdoctoral research fellow at UCLA (Chemistry and Biochemistry Department). Subsequently, he worked at Shell and at the University of Utrecht. Between 1987 and 2007, Frenkel carried out his research at the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics (AMOLF) in Amsterdam where he has been employed since 1987. In the same period, he was appointed (part time) professor at the Universities of Utrecht and Amsterdam. Since 2007 he is 1968 Professor of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge. He was Head of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge from 2011 to 2015.

Frenkel has co-authored ´Understanding Molecular Simulation´ (together with Berend Smit), which has grown into a handbook used worldwide by aspiring computational physicists.

Awards and honours

In 2008 he was made a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (1998), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2008), and TWAS (2012). He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2006. In 2016 he was elected as a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a recipient of the Aneesur Rahman Prize from the American Physical Society and the Berni J Alder CECAM prize.

In 2000 he was one of three winners of the Dutch Spinoza Prize. He is the recipient of the 2016 Boltzmann Medal.