CQN Professor wins MacArthur Fellowship

Danna Freedman, the F.G. Keyes Professor of Chemistry at MIT, has been named a recipient of a 2022 MacArthur Fellowship. Dr. Freedman is a principal investigator in the NSF-funded Center for Quantum Networks.

Often referred to as “genius grants,” the fellowships come with a five-year, $800,000 prize, which recipients are free to use as they see fit. Freedman, who found out about the award in early September, before it was publicly announced, said she was “completely in shock” after hearing that she had been chosen for the fellowship.

Freedman, whose research focuses on using inorganic chemistry to create new molecules for quantum information science, joined the MIT faculty in 2021. Before coming to MIT, she was a professor of chemistry at Northwestern University.

Freedman designs molecules that can function as quantum units, or qubits. Applications for these kinds of molecules include quantum sensing and communication. Quantum sensors consist of systems in which some particles are in such a delicately balanced state that they are affected by miniscule variations in their environments. This allows them to detect tiny changes in electric and magnetic fields, as well physical properties of nanometer-scale systems.

You can read more about Danna’s work and the MacArthur award here: https://news.mit.edu/2022/danna-freedman-macarthur-fellowship-1012