Daan Frenkel

Daan Frenkel (born 1948, Amsterdam) is a Dutch computational physicist in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge. He is the recipient of the 2016 Boltzmann Medal.

Education

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

Career

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. Since 2011, he is Head of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge. 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). Since 2006, he is a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (London). He is a recipient of the Aneesur Rahman Prize from the American Physical Society and the Berni J Alder CECAM prize. Frenkel has co-authored ´Understanding Molecular Simulation´ (together with Berend Smit), which has grown into a handbook used worldwide by aspiring computational physicists.