Michael Freedman is Director of Station Q. Microsoft's global effort to bring together the world's mathematicians, computer scientists, quantum physicists and engineers to build a scalable, fault-tolerant universal quantum computer.

Freedman joined Microsoft in 1997 as a Fields Medal-winning mathematician whose accomplishments included a proof of the 4-dimensional Pioncaré conjecture, the discovery (with Donaldson and Kirby) of exotic smooth structures on Euclidean 4-space, applications of minimal surfaces to topology, and estimates for the stored energy in magnetic fields.  His work since joining Microsoft has been primarily on the interface of quantum computation, solid state physics, and quantum topology.