Daan Frenkel

Education Frenkel completed his PhD at the University of Amsterdam in 1977 in experimental physical chemistry.

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

Awards and honours In 2000 he was one of three winners of the Dutch Spinoza Prize. In 2008 he was appointed 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 The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) in 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. In 2007 he received the Aneesur Rahman Prize from the American Physical Society (APS) and the Berni J Alder CECAM prize. In 2010 he received the Soft Matter and Biophysical Chemistry Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), UK.

He received the 2016 Boltzmann Medal and the 2022 Lorentz Medal. Asteroid 12651 Frenkel, discovered by astronomers during the third Palomar–Leiden trojan survey in 1977, was named in his honor in 2018.