Danna E. Freedman

Danna Freedman is an American chemist and the Frederick George Keyes Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her group's research focuses on applying inorganic chemistry towards questions in physics, with an emphasis on quantum information science, materials with emergent properties, and magnetism. Freedman was awarded the 2019 ACS Award in Pure Chemistry and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.

Early life and education Freedman grew up in Upstate New York. As a teenager, she led educational programmes for young people at the Kopernik Observatory & Science Center.

She has continued to study Kagome lattices, and showed that by compressing a magnetically frustrated mineral jarosite it was possible to form a new, exotic magnetic state. In this state, Freedman proposes that long range magnetic order is lost when the antisymmetric Dzyaloshinski-Moriya exchange interaction vanishes. Her research investigates the development of molecules whose spin states can act as quantum bits (so-called qubits), where quantum information is encoded onto magnetic (spin) states.

Awards and honors Sloan Research Fellowship 2017 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers 2018 Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow 2018 Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar 2019 American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry 2022 MacArthur Fellowship

Selected publications Her publications include: